A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  The Delhi companion of my recent visits is Mahesh, former Marxist, a writer and translator, who has also tried his hand at a couple of businesses, book publishing and an eco-friendly gift shop. He was born in today’s Pakistan and grew up in Nehru’s Delhi, a city of refugees then, and recalls it when it was a much smaller city and much of South Delhi was farmland and small settlements. He himself is intimate with it, possessive, more its gregarious storyteller than guide.

  We reach the jewellery market, a cross street lit up with neon and gold and shimmering saris, crowded with middle-class women out to shop here from the suburbs, cell phones to the ear. This famous street is called Dariba Kalan, the word “dariba” derived from the Persian and meaning “incomparable.” A man hails us from one of the shops. Mahesh replies and then explains to me that Satish is a Hindi teacher at a local college who comes to the shop every afternoon to ply the family trade in costume jewellery. We go over and exchange greetings. The store is more of a stall, with an open window at which Satish sits cross-legged amidst the glitter of bangles and anklets, elaborate necklaces, rings and hairpins, all displayed in the showcase before him and on the wall behind. His eyes all the time dart upon the busy street. I am told that both Mahesh and Satish taught at the same college as young graduates, before Mahesh left for a doctorate and a university post. They banter about their youth. Satish, post-Partition, supported right-wing parties, and Mahesh of course was the Marxist. That was a long time ago, the politics now are less intense, the old antagonists more mellow. Satish’s family has had the business since 1917, renting the site originally from a Muslim who departed on the eve of Partition. The landlord now is the city. Relations in the neighbourhood were cordial once upon a time, Satish explains, and you could go from roof to roof from one end of the city to another, irrespective of whether the house you trod on belonged to a Hindu or a Muslim. The Muslims are mostly the craftspeople, the Hindus the traders. Tea is brought for us as we stand outside, and samosas, in spite of our demurrals (we know we have no choice), the tumult of Old Delhi brushing at our backs. It is acknowledged with a smile that business is booming, property values have multiplied, what with the new subway stop close by. But a neighbour has now laid a claim to the site where the stall is located and the case is in court. Two of Satish’s children are in the United States. So many people I meet in Delhi have relations, especially children, overseas that I wonder if this phenomenon is the undying resonance of Partition, the restless refugees never completely at home. We depart, and Mahesh explains to me how time has whittled away the old joint families, in many cases a single branch remaining to run the business or simply to hold on to the family property. Disputes are legendary, ruthless, and Dickensian.

  From Dariba Kalan we turn into Kinari (Border) Bazar, dedicated to all sorts of multicoloured decorations for festivals and borders for clothing.

  Pre-modern Delhi was a grand place once; here, the aristocracy lived and mingled and came to shop; splendid parades were held. Travellers from Europe, and ambassadors and agents of its kings and queens, drawn by curiosity, business, or intrigue to the grand Mughal’s capital, strolled its avenues. A waterway ran along the main avenue to provide the residents with water; the beauty of the moon’s reflection upon it, so goes one story, confirmed by Satish, gave the area its name, chand, meaning “moon.” Much blood was also shed here, when Nadir Shah the Persian swooped down upon Delhi and oversaw the massacre of its citizens and the plundering of Dariba Kalan, and during the “Mutiny” of 1857, when the last Mughal emperor was drawn into it and his forces lost against the British. Nowadays there is no distinction between the business and residential areas. Many of the wealthy houses used to be havelis, compounds entered through large gates on the street which opened into square courtyards, all around which were the quarters of an extended family. Some of these old havelis are in ruins, others have been converted into godowns, or warehouses, or divided into individual shops and residences.

  Let’s go find Ghalib’s house, says Mahesh.

  Ghalib’s name is a household word in northern India; he occupies a place in Urdu letters somewhat akin to Pushkin in Russia. (The two were born within three years of each other.) Enthusiasts often compare Ghalib to Shakespeare, which is perhaps reasonable in terms of his exalted status, but he wrote only poetry and letters, and Urdu does not have the status of English. Ghalib tugs at men’s hearts, he sings to the romantic in every Indian male. After all, the song part of the song-and-dance Bollywood until recently was nothing but pure Urdu poetry (many of the original song-writers were poets in that language), of which Ghalib is the acknowledged god.

  He was born Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan in 1796 in Agra, to parents of Turkish ancestry. Ghalib was his pen name. He did not have family income, his father having died when he was young, and therefore he depended on a pension from the British and on other patronage. Money problems seem to have dogged him all his adult life. His career coincided with the tenure of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah, a great lover of poetry and no mean poet himself; therefore he was witness to the violence against the British during the so-called Mutiny, and the devastation of Delhi and its population at their hands when it was quelled. Ghalib loved mangoes, wine, and gambling, for the last of which sins he was once sent to prison. His sense of humour is legend, and there are many affectionate stories told about him, in the vein of the irreverence of genius. And so: When one night during the Mutiny he was confronted by British soldiers who asked him if he was a Muslim, Ghalib is said to have replied, Half a Muslim; I drink wine, but don’t eat pork. He was married to a pious woman of his class, but in his younger days had had an affair with a courtesan called Chaudvin, who died quite young. Despite his sense of humour, his ghazals and his quite beautiful letters carry an undoubtedly distinctive tone of sadness. A picture of him, almost emblematic for its familiarity, shows a white-bearded elderly man in a tall black hat, an embroidered robe over a kurta.

  Of his love affair he wrote late in his life, in a remarkably frank and moving letter, “It is forty years or more since it happened, and although I long ago abandoned such things and left the field once and for all, there are times even now when the memory of her charming ways comes back to me and I shall not forget her death as long as I live…. Fate poured into my cup too the poison of this pain, and as the bier of my beloved was borne along the road, the dust rose from the road of that fortitude which was my essence. In the brightness of broad day I sat on sack cloth and clad myself in black in mourning for my mistress, and in the black nights, in the solitude of sorrow, I was the moth that flew to the flame of her burnt-out candle. She was the partner of my bed, whom at the time of parting my jealous heart could not consign even to God’s keeping.”

  What moviemaker could resist this scene of Old Delhi, the old poet recalling his love and its loss, against the backdrop of the Mughal court in its final days, where rival great poets still gathered to recite their poetry and the doomed emperor, too, joined in? Two Indian films have been made about him, in which the poetry is sung by the country’s finest singers of ghazals. The sparse and clean streets in the films and the large almost empty houses couldn’t provide more contrast to the reality of Old Delhi today.

  Mahesh and I walk through a maze of gulleys—small narrow streets—in pursuit of Ghalib in this his neighbourhood. Mahesh knows it like his backyard, which it is, in a manner, for the former Marxist Party offices were here. As the evening hour approaches, congeals, the crowds around us thicken. In places, the old architecture still lingers, visible in the latticework balconies and screens, many now in tatters, and arched doorways, their original massive doors repainted; precarious and ugly vertical extensions rise up like scabs upon old single-storey structures. One alley contains a slaughterhouse, a few cows awaiting their fate patiently outside. There is a street where books are saddle-stitched, another has the paper market, shops selling fax and copying paper, old-style account books, cover stock, notebooks; a street of formerly copper, now mixed, ware
. Here my companion stops abruptly and points to the backroom of a hardware store, to what looks like a medieval scene framed by the doorway: a man seated cross-legged on a floor covered in white linen, doing accounts on a book placed on a low table. He is the munim, leaning forward as he writes with painstaking care. Millions of rupees of business is conducted every day here, where walking carelessly, unaware of your wallet, can be a hazard. Once more the veiled women, then boys in handsome kurta-pyjamas and white caps walking to prayer.

  But it’s difficult to find Ghalib’s house. People don’t know it, we sound foolish simply asking about it: What kind of worthless layabouts on a busy day would go looking for the house of a poet long dead? Finally at some kind of educational stall with Urdu signs above the entrance, we are told to take a rickshaw to some street. Here, after a few more questions, we are directed to a perfumer’s stall. The man sends a boy with us, past an entrance, then through a room, a courtyard, then another room, on one wall of which is a boarded-up window. Through broken slats we see brick and rubble outside. On the other side of the room is an arched doorway or window, it is difficult to determine which, that leads, we are told, to the room where Ghalib wrote his poetry. As we come out, the perfumer dabs us with a fragrant oil, tells us that the hotel down the road—a modern two-storey boxlike concrete structure—is where Ghalib’s house once stood.

  This, of the greatest and most revered poet in the Urdu language, and one of the great literary figures of the subcontinent. We walk back slowly with a strange feeling of emptiness.

  Some years later I find out that the government of Delhi has purchased a site where Ghalib had lived, and put up a museum to him. I decide to pay it a visit. The place is indicated on a map as situated near a street called Balli Maran (Dead Cat) intersecting upper Chandni Chowk. Even with this information, it is not easy to find; my rickshaw driver has to stop twice to ask for Ghalib’s haveli, the second time when we’ve just passed it. And now that I am here, it’s impossible to tell which of the two places I previously saw, the rubble or the hotel, has become the museum. It is not very impressive. A narrow corridor leads to a medium-sized room divided into sections by mocked-up arched doorways. This apparently is a reconstructed portion of the haveli where Ghalib spent the latter years of his life. Built into two walls are showcases exhibiting a dummy of the poet sitting, some artifacts from his period, a few quotations from his poetry. A young couple have brought their boy to see the great poet’s house, and as the father instructs him how to operate the camera, the mother sings from the poetry. A Pakistani woman has come with a porter bearing a large camera.

  It seems to me that perhaps the rubble should have been preserved as a monument, not to the man but to his neglect. Is this all there is? I ask a man in a skullcap who now sits at the street entrance. He tilts his head to indicate, Just so.

  I walk outside, sit down at a stall next door for tea. It is Sunday morning. Three boys evidently dressed up and recently bathed walk in, grinning, and take their seats. Confidently they order paya and parantha for their breakfast. Paya is a curry made of goat trotters; fatty but tasty, and a breakfast delicacy even in Toronto. I am reminded of childhood.

  On March 29, 1857, an Indian sepoy called Mangal Pandey shot his English adjutant in the parade ground at Barrackpore army camp, near Calcutta, with his musket and then slashed him with his sword. Lieutenant Baugh was not killed, but when the colonel ordered the guard to arrest Pandey, they refused. Pandey, however, at the point of finally being overpowered, shot himself, but was not killed, and within ten days was convicted and hanged in a hurry. This event is often regarded as the flashpoint of a widespread insurrection that followed, called the Indian Mutiny by the British. Indian nationalists prefer to call it the First War of Independence. Whatever one calls it, it was provoked by a general sense of suspicion and resentment against the rule of the British East India Company that was already prevalent in much of the country, and especially within the army, where it was believed that the cartridges for the new Enfield rifles which had recently been brought into use came coated with beef or pork fat. This fuelled the rumour that the British were out to defile the religious purity of the Indian soldiers serving in their army, with the object ultimately of converting them to Christianity. Whether Mangal Pandey was a revolutionary hero, or a sepoy high on bhang at the time of his deed, is a question still debated. But while on his rampage he gave voice to the suspicion and hatred that many inside the army and outside it harboured towards the ruling race, and he became a symbol of Indian resistance to British rule. A few weeks after the incident at Barrackpore there was a mutiny at the army camp in Meerut, near Delhi, and in the violence, which spread to the bazaars, fifty-two European men, women, and children were killed. Some of the mutineers then headed for Delhi to enlist the Mughal emperor to lead their cause, and mutiny and violence erupted in other places as well.

  The emperor was Bahadur Shah, a frail eighty-two-year-old resident of the Red Fort, a puppet whom the Company kept on the throne with a pension, but still beloved to his subjects. His father was a Sufi and his mother a Hindu Rajput. He is said to have likened his Muslim and Hindu subjects to his right and left eye, did not eat beef, and visited Hindu temples wearing a mark on his forehead. He liked animals and the arts, and was devoted to Urdu poetry. His own compositions are recited to this day by the aficionados. A weak, broken ruler at the sunset of Mughal rule in India, or a philosopher poet who knew his time and that of his ancestors was at last over?

  But when a contingent of the rebels of Meerut arrived in Delhi and pleaded with Bahadur Shah to lead them in their war against the British, perhaps sensing a glimmer of hope for him and his dynasty, after saying first, “I did not call for you,” he relented. He sat down on his throne and accepted their tribute. He appointed several princes to positions of command in the new army and wrote to neighbouring rajas to join forces with him.

  “On May 11, 1857,” Ghalib wrote memorably of that day in Delhi, “the disorders began here. On that same day I shut the doors and gave up going out. One cannot pass the days without something to do, and I began to write my experiences, appending also such news as I heard from time to time.”

  Ghalib had English friends, drew an English pension, and with his station in life did not have much sympathy for the rebels, who were not of his class and had only disrupted his life. He relates how they overran the city, and describes with remarkable empathy for the foreign, white victims how the rebels began killing men, women, and children, and burning down their houses:

  There were humble, quiet men, who passed their days drawing some modest sum from British bounty and eating their crust of bread…. No man among them knew an arrow from an axe…. In truth such men are made to people the lanes and by-lanes, not to gird up their loins and go out to battle. These men, when they saw that a dam of dust and straw cannot stem the fast-flowing flood, took to their only remedy, and every man of them went to his home and resigned himself to grief. I too am one of these grief-stricken men. I was in my home…but in the twinkling of an eye…every street and every lane was full of galloping horsemen, and the sound of marching men, coming wave upon wave, rose in the air. Then there was not so much as a handful of dust that was not red with the blood of men.

  In contrast to this sympathy, which would have been shared by many upper-class Delhiites, many others embraced the incoming sepoys as liberators, the local Urdu paper going so far as to gloat over the murders of the English. Once the foreigners had been expelled or killed, the sepoys increasingly came to be seen as unruly and undisciplined, peasant warriors who seemed to have lost their zeal and spent their time creating disturbances at the tea houses and brothels. Still, with the imprimatur of the Mughal emperor, the insurgency continued to spread widely in the cities of the north, to become, as the historian William Dalrymple puts it in his detailed account of the events, “the single most serious armed challenge any Western empire would face, anywhere in the world, in the entire course of the nineteenth centu
ry.”

  The majority of the rebels were Hindus. Among many Muslims the revolt took on the tone of a jihad against kafirs (infidels), an attitude of hostility against Western dominance that in one form or another has lasted to this day.

  Four months after the attack on Delhi, in September 1857 the British forces, with the help of Sikh soldiers, retook the city and quelled the uprising everywhere else, and the retribution that followed was savage.

  History, as is so often the case, and not unlike reports of “rebellions” in other colonies or occupied countries, has given us a skewed, victors’ look at the events. Indians did not record details as the British did. The British were few, each of them accounted for and written about, and their fates appear to us as personal tragedies or acts of heroism, illustrated sometimes by photographs; the Indians in the aftermath simply died or were hanged in their multitudes. Whereas the English showed themselves as arrogant, incompetent, brave, or pathetic, their descriptions making them live as individuals with faces, the sepoys were merely low-class fanatics and murderers.

  Of the aftermath of the Mutiny in Delhi, its poet Ghalib would write:

  Now every English soldier that bears arms

  Is sovereign, and free to work his will.

  Men dare not venture out into the street

  And terror chills their hearts within them still.

  Their homes enclose them as in prison walls

  And in the Chauk [Chandni Chowk] the victors hang and kill.

  The city is athirst with Muslim blood