A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  Vegetables of all sorts are a passion. He will angle towards them at a market or a stall, and fondle a tomato or an eggplant to make you blush. Recently, to add to his demanding sansara that often keeps him on edge, he has bought a farm outside Delhi where he grows vegetables to his heart’s content, and he is able to carry out lengthy knowledgeable discussions with the vendors he meets on the streets. Politics arouses him, though one suspects that he is now at the calmer stage in his life, and he detests the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which created the electric climate in which the Babri (Mughal emperor Babur’s) Mosque was destroyed by its fanatical supporters, leading to violent communal outbursts, and whose state branch oversaw the pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat. And yet curiously, I have always thought, he does not appear to have any close Muslim friends or any from the lower castes. This reflects more the divisions in Indian society than deliberate choice. And this is true of all the Punjabi Delhiites I know. I myself have not come to know any Muslims in Delhi; I hardly see them, except in Old Delhi or, in minuscule numbers, at a university class or at some function. Discrimination in housing against Muslims is quite common. It is, when one becomes aware of it, the oddest feeling, because everywhere in Delhi are signs of that historical Muslim presence. It is also a subject one never talks about; few people outside of India, one imagines, are aware of these absences and silences. The writer Ramachandra Guha, however, recently published a very forthright piece in the New York Times about this aspect of living in post-Partition Delhi:

  Yet among my close friends in India there was not a single Muslim. The novelist Mukul Kesavan, a contemporary, has written that in his school in Delhi he never came across a Muslim name: “The only place you were sure of meeting Muslims was the movies.” Some of the finest actors, singers, composers and directors in Bombay’s film industry were Muslims. But in law, medicine, business and the upper echelons of public service, Hindus dominated. There were sprinklings of Christians and Sikhs, but very few Muslims.

  But this is how my friend Mahesh came to meet Rajiv Gandhi in Connaught Place. He was on his way to pay an electric bill somewhere on this block when, to his great surprise, he saw the prime minister himself browsing outside a bookstore. A young man had just asked him for an autograph, and Rajiv looked around for a pen, then asked Mahesh if he could borrow his. Certainly, Mahesh replied. This was two days before the prime minister was killed by a suicide bomb down south, set off by a Sri Lankan Tamil separatist, his body shredded beyond recognition.

  As we leave the coffee house, we pass the very bookstore, which is hardly more than a stall, with a rack of magazines at the doorway. Twenty years after Mahesh’s meeting with Rajiv Gandhi, the same shopkeeper sits at a small table at the entrance. Yes, he confirms to my friend’s enthusiastic reminder, two days before his assassination Rajiv had stopped by. Not a spark, a twinkle, in the eye, not a twitch in the face or a change in the voice to betray any emotion—as though prime ministers regularly stop by at his store before getting blown to bits.

  Thus Mahesh, among a circle of friends, a bit of a showman. But at more private moments, when no one else is around, and because he has become a close friend, he reveals the soft core, tells me of the toll of Partition on the refugees who had to leave everything behind and start anew.

  His parents, from a small town in northern Punjab, had been given a home in Sabzi Mandi, the vegetable market in the Old Delhi area; his mother’s family—his nana and uncles—were first at a camp, a converted British jail that later became the Maulana Azad Medical College near the Delhi Gate, before moving in with his parents. Refugees were awaiting compensation for the homes and businesses left behind in now-Pakistan, and so while his younger uncle sold ice cream on the street, his proud nana, formerly a village moneylender, put to use an old skill, stringing cots to earn a modest income. More than twenty people were crammed into a two-room apartment, until the in-laws were finally settled in Lajpat Nagar further to the south, now a bustling shopping market, their bitterness towards Muslims never abated. The young uncles flirted with the RSS, the right-wing Hindu communalist organization with its own paramilitary corps. His nana was awarded a stationery store that would go on to make a fortune. There must be thousands of Bania trader families in Delhi with similar stories. The number of refugees who arrived in India from Pakistan has been estimated in the millions.

  But it is in the details of the new family dynamics—the scrounging for money, the extra jobs, the paying guests taken in to make ends meet, the straining marital relationships in a tradition where marriages are never broken, however tormenting—it is in these that the painful memories lie, that bring a shudder to the face and a tear to the eye as they are recalled.

  His stories bring to mind the black-and-white Bollywood family dramas of the fifties and sixties, in which the protagonists are almost always poor, and the families, stressed to breaking point, always come through in the end. In my childhood the circumstances depicted in these films had seemed imaginable but distant; now, through Mahesh, they seem strangely close and real. There is one image that is etched clearly in his memory, as it is now in mine: his young mother with her young children returning home from her parents’ house, taking a shortcut by walking along the railway tracks. His uncle, her younger brother, would accompany them part of the way.

  It is the attitudes formed during those harsh refugee days, Mahesh affirms, all the insecurity, then the resultant greed, aggression, and self-centredness, that persist today in the relationships and attitudes of the modern Delhiites that outsiders often remark upon.

  And so this is the newest Delhi: converted refugee camps and settlements—presently booming in the new globalized economy—interspersed among and over the old Delhis: the markets and housing colonies of Lajpat Nagar, Sarojini Nagar, Patel Nagar, Vasant Kunj, Hauz Khas…progressing ever southwards, towards the oldest Delhis and beyond.

  We are sitting one day in a hotel room—we’ve been travelling in Kerala—and news has come over Mahesh’s cell that the younger uncle is critically ill in hospital. (The older one is already dead.) Mahesh is the next oldest male in the family. And so this freest of spirits, one who would prefer to travel and explore, write and tell stories, is the family’s crutch, for all to seek comfort and decisions from.

  His daughter has recently got married. It is our mutual regret that I missed the ceremony and celebrations. They were lavish, he says. Drinks flowed freely and the food was both veg and nonveg. (He eats only veg.) The groom is also Punjabi, and a Canadian, in the business of developing condominiums in the satellite town of Noida.

  We talk of caste. He would not have objected, he says, if his daughter had picked a man of a lower caste. How low? It is a difficult question to ask, and I do not ask it. He is quite liberal in this matter, he says, and I know.

  And a Muslim?—I ask. What if she had picked a Muslim man?

  The family would not have accepted that, he says. The memories are still bitter.

  It’s a deeply unsettling revelation. Sixty years after Partition, to hear this. But it’s not sixty years, it’s not Partition, I come gradually to realize; the prejudices go deeper, and they work both ways. Happily, the new generations in North America are kicking them off.

  In November 1858, a year after the Mutiny and directly as its result, the East India Company, which in 1613 had been granted permission to open a trading post on the coast by the Mughal emperor Jehangir, and went on to dominate much of the country while representing British interests, was abolished, and India was placed under the direct rule of the British government. The governor general, Lord Canning, became the first British viceroy of India. A new era called “the British Raj” began.

  In 1911, at the Royal Durbar in Delhi, held on the occasion of King George and Queen Mary’s visit, the king announced that the capital of “the Empire” would move from Calcutta to Delhi. Shortly thereafter, Edwin Lutyens was commissioned to plan the new city in collaboration with Herbert Baker. Lutyens, a highly tal
ented architect with connections in high places, had begun his career as a designer of elegant English country houses. Recently, however, he had designed the Johannesburg Art Gallery, with which project he began to think of a Classical architectural style suitable for the overseas possessions of an empire. For one thing, they had to project strength and stability.

  Lutyens corresponded regularly with his wife, Lady Emily, and in his lengthy, candid letters we learn much about his attitudes and thoughts concerning the imperial capital he had been commissioned to lay out.

  Lutyens arrived in India bearing a certain intellectual hauteur. He was arrogant and imperialistic, always conscious of the superiority of the West. India was the antithesis to his tastes and values, everything about it irked him. “It is all baffling, people and objects,” he wrote. He was appalled at the lack of sanitation (“nil”) and cleanliness. Of Indian architectural accomplishments he was utterly disdainful, and its historical ruins he found bad and lacking dignity.

  Architecture—there is practically nil. Veneered joinery in stone, concrete and marble on a gigantic scale there is lots of, but no real architecture and nothing is built to last….

  Personally I do not believe there is any real Indian architecture or any great tradition. They are just spurts by various mushroom dynasties…. And then it is essentially the building style of children.

  The Qutb Minar was an “uncouth and careless unknowing and unseeing shape.”

  How could he then design a city sympathetic with Indian lives and values? That was not his purpose; he had come to build a city that would be a symbol and an administrative centre of the Empire. Ironically, on his home front, Lady Emily had become a devotee of J. Krishnamurti, who according to the theosophists was the Maitreya (the successor of Buddha according to prophecy), causing Lutyens a great deal of unhappiness.

  The location of the capital was much debated. The viceroy, Lord Hardinge, flip-flopped between three sites: North Ridge, beyond Old Delhi to the north; Malcha, on the South Ridge, to the far west and south of the old city; and Raisina, adjacent and to the south of the old city. Finally the last site was picked. Then there was the “Battle of the Rise.” Lutyens preferred the secretariat buildings to be on a gentle rise along the Rajpath (then called the Kingsway) so that the Viceroy’s House (now Rashtrapati Bhavan), to be designed by Lutyens, would be at the top and be visible along the whole way. Baker wanted the secretariat buildings, which he designed, to share the height with the Viceroy’s House, which as a consequence would become blocked part of the way. Baker won and Lutyens was furious. In the matter of style, Lutyens naturally preferred Western Classical; the viceroy wanted Indo-Saracenic. In the end a compromise was achieved.

  Between the old Shahjahanabad in the north and the deserted older cities to the south, New Delhi was laid out as a pattern of contiguous and overlapping hexagons and triangles of wide avenues, its central axis the Rajpath, which joins the Rashtrapati Bhavan—by far the grandest building in the new city—to the massive war memorial, called India Gate, beyond which lie the Purana Qila and the excavations of the ancient Indraprastha. The grandeurs of Persepolis, the Acropolis, the pleasure dome of Kubla Khan, and the Mughals—these were the visions in its architects’ minds as they began to conceive their project. They produced a magnificent and beautiful city, but unfortunately more of a showcase capital, a monument to the arrogance of Empire, to demonstrate daily to the native its might and what it represented. It reminded one visitor of a “little Versailles” and another of a more pleasing Nuremberg. It is a city to take a pleasing drive through and admire the legacy of “the Britishers” en route to somewhere else; to come to for a picnic on a holiday at one of its lush green parks and play cards and watch the kids fly balloons and kites; to come to and watch a military parade on Republic Day from its broad sidewalks. But the commercial and the cultural hubs thrive elsewhere.

  Twenty thousand Indian labourers were employed in the construction, Lutyens tells us. “The sandstone used was of the same strata as that used by Akbar and Shah Jahan. The stoneyard was one of the largest in the world, employing over 3500 men, who dressed over 3 1/2 million cubic feet and about 350,000 cubic feet of marble. To the south of the city, 700 million bricks were made out of 27 kilns…. There were 84 miles of electric distribution cables and 130 miles of street lighting. 50 miles of roads and 30 miles of service roads.”

  From one of the contractor families that built New Delhi comes Khushwant Singh, the nonagenarian grand old man of the city, author of numerous books, including the classic Partition novel Train to Pakistan and a scholarly history of the Sikhs, and essayist par excellence, whose columns speak to millions every week in India and are circulated over the Internet. An institution. Born in a small town in the Punjabi part of what is now Pakistan, he attended Lahore College, the alma mater of a number of eminent men of the subcontinent, before practising law for a brief period in Lahore. He has been a government press attaché, a radio journalist, and editor of a number of newspapers and magazines. I met him briefly at a book party at the end of my first visit. Penguin India had published an edition of my first novel and he had written a very flattering column on it in a newspaper Sunday supplement. He gave me a warm embrace when I was introduced, and then identified the community I must come from, which figured fictitiously in the novel, and which not a single person outside of that community, in India or elsewhere, had been able to do. It was an embarrassing moment, for he was and is a presence much vaunted, and I did not know what to say; my spoken Hindi, too, was abominably halting.

  He can get away with saying things sometimes in much the same way a naughty grand-uncle might, to the mild disapproval of the parents. Thus he writes about the “nauseating” habit of nose-picking, then with relish goes into details of the practice, using as his reference an American book that came his way. He hands out a lesson on sex: “Also, in monogamous marriages, the absence of variety (which is indeed the spice of life when it comes to sex) and monotony deprive both partners of the urge to engage in love-making.” Often there will be the pithy observation on some aspect of Indian culture—the fast of Ramadan, the festival of Diwali, the significance of the river Ganges—a reminder, actually, for mutual understanding and tolerance, in this monolithic-looking nation teeming with differences. India has many holidays, he reminds his readers, because it is not monoreligious like its neighbours. He scorns politicians and journalists, and always decries bigots of any stripe. Politicians are crooked “windbags” and rabble-rousers. For the journalists he has a special term, “crawlers,” because of their craven attitudes towards the politicians. Quoting a poem by the great Allama Iqbal, he chides the imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid for making inflammatory remarks to a crowd of followers on the Janpath, the grand avenue of the capital. To the previous home minister, L. K. Advani, he once said in full public hearing at a book launch, “You are a puritan. You do not drink, you do not smoke, you do not womanize…. Such men are dangerous.” And he was incensed, as he reports to his readers, when “the crawlers” did not even mention his presence at the event, over which he had presided, no less.

  He is therefore a humorous, arrogant, and yet modest encyclopedia of Indian life; and an old scold; and his readers, helpless about the state of their country’s politics, love him because they agree, more or less, with what he says. He’s been around, does not need to kowtow, and the list of people he has known is enviable—politicians, writers, film stars. He can tell many a historical anecdote. There is one admittedly titillating account of the time when he was the press officer at the Indian High Commission in London. Pandit Nehru was attending the first Commonwealth Prime Ministers Conference, and after an embarrassing incident reported in the London papers involving Prime Minister Nehru and Lady Edwina Mountbatten (the two had a relationship, long a subject of gossip and speculation), the high commissioner, Krishna Menon, advised young Khushwant to keep out of the prime minister’s way, which he did. On the day of Nehru’s departure, however, “many London pap
ers carried pictures [of Nehru and Lady Edwina] taken in the cosy basement of the Greek cafe.” Khushwant continues, these many years later,

  This time there was no escape. I was summoned to Claridges Hotel. As I entered Panditji’s [Nehru’s] room, he looked me up and down to ask me who I was. I had been with him for an entire week. “Sir, I am your press officer,” I replied. “You have strange notions of publicity,” he said in a withering tone. At the time, it did not occur to him or to me that the only person who could have tipped off the press was Krishna Menon. Menon had a mind like a corkscrew.

  In two columns he bewails the Delhiites’ lack of pride in their city’s history, and the politicians’ “strangling” of its heritage.

  Twenty years ago you could go from Safdarjang to Mehrauli, from the Qutub Minar to Tuglaqabad and Suraj Kund and get one uninterrupted view of ruins of ancient monuments…. They made a spectacular sight. Today you can’t see any of them because housing colonies have come up around them and the monuments themselves are occupied by squatters. In mosque courtyards buffaloes are tethered, mausoleum walls are marked as wickets for boys playing cricket; where the Sultans of Delhi held court, chaiwalas ply their trade.