The Shahar-e-Dilli exhibition on the ruins of Shahjahanabad, as visualised by artist Yajenekka Aroraa at the India Habitat Centre, brought to mind Delhi’s old landmarks. It was C.M. Villier’s Stewart who commented in the first decade of the 20th Century that the vast sandy plain of Delhi, stretching up to the Qutab Minar, dotted with monuments built over the centuries by many dynasties, boggles the mind. She was not alone in this bewilderment. Even before her the compilers of the Delhi Gazetteer of 1883-84 had quoted European writers of late 18th and early 19th centuries who had marvelled at the complexity of the Delhi landscape. Like Shelley’s Ozymandais, “King of Kings”, whose shattered statue gave an idea of his greatness, with the desert sands stretching far away, the rulers of Delhi too have left behind a legacy which even in its ruined state inspires thoughts too deep to fathom.
In Shahjajanabad, a history of 350 years is laid bare in preserved edifices and in ruins too. Take Bhuli Bhatiyari-ka-Mahal whose gateway is the main remnant of a vanished palace which is hard to conceptualise. You look at it and wonder who the celebrated Bhatiyari of Firozeshah Tughlaq’s reign was. Seven hundred years is a long time and the Ridge area near Karol Bagh is not exactly Shahjahanabad but an outskirt of it. Still this ruin connects in a way with Firoze’s Kotla though it is not haunted by jinns but by the banshee ghost of a gypsy who happened to be an innkeeper’s daughter, if one were to overlook Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s comment that the word “Bhatiyari” was a corruption of the name of a nobleman, Bhu Ali Bhatti.
That was in-depth historical reasoning but fancy weaves its own web in which the Bhatiyari is caught like a mysterious spider luring the visitor into her enmeshed parlour, just like the fly in the nursery rhyme that alas, children of today don’t recite. (“Come into my parlour, said the Spider to the Fly,” who however was too intelligent to fall into the honeyed trap)
Unravelling monuments
Percival Spear was fascinated by what he saw in the Delhi of 70 years ago. He walked in the footsteps of the medieval sultans in Mehrauli to discover monuments and the ruins of those that defied description and concealed the identity of the ones they were meant to commemorate. Earlier, Miss Stewart had done the same. She lamented the state of the then forsaken Roshanara gardens before the iconic club was built there after the Third Afghan War. Following long after her, Mrs Molynihan, wife of a former US Ambassador, discovered other Mughal gardens that had ceased to exist as such.
The Lothian Road cemetery, where rest Europeans of the pre-“Mutiny” days, is now a ruined God’s Acre with many of the tombstones, which gave an insight into the lives of people who had come from Britain and settled down in Delhi, missing. One epitaph was of the merchant who buried three wives but the fourth did the same for him. Many such quaint reminders are found all over Shahjahanabad like the ramshackle house of Ahmed Ali in Kuncha Pandit (where “Twilight in Delhi” was written), a grave, a hammam, a turret, like the one in the old city wall with a watch-tower on which a Mughal sentry kept a lookout for invaders, thieves, robbers and other undesirable characters. Beyond it are the deserted Mortello towers with a broken bridge that now leads to nowhere and just hangs like a question mark on the face of time. The sun, however, still catches the turret in a noose of light, as Omar Khayyam so famously depicted of the one built by a sultan in Iran.
The caravanserais of which Omar spoke are also found in Delhi though they are now little more than ruins, but Arab Sarai is still there right and proper, with the nearby Afsarwallah tomb, without any inkling as to who this medieval official was. According to historian Narayani Gupta, “The city of Delhi is as full of surprises as a good treasure hunt. You may suddenly find a ruined arch, many hundred years old, beside a recently-built bungalow (as in Daryaganj) or see the reflection of a high-rise building in the waters of an ancient well” (like the step-well known as Ugarsen-ki-Baoli). But only the reflection of an old, gnarled tree is visible in the Dhaula Kuan of Shah Alam’s time, which once was situated on the old Palam-Gurgaon road but now is surrounded by a garden. It’s a ruin which lends its name to a famous area, the focal point in Delhi’s criss-cross of many roads. Why is it named Dhaula Kuan? Probably because of the white sand called “dhaula” found in it.
The minaret of Sultan Alauddin Khilji was not built to catch a glimpse of Padmavati, the Rajput heroine who is erroneously believed to have caught his fancy, leading to the sacking of the fortress of Chittor. But it still catches the noose of light thrown by the sun on the ascendant before visitors begin to pour in to view the Qutub Minar, which it was planned to dwarf. Mehrauli is the biggest graveyard of the Sultanate period, followed by the locality of Nizamuddin with Humayun’s tomb towering above it and containing the graves of many Mughal princes and princesses, some of them resting in anonymity with the likes of the unfortunate Dara Shikoh, whose headless body is buried there.
All this past of Delhi is reflected in the ruins of Shahjahanbad too as depicted by artist Yajenekka Aroraa in exhibits that do not include South Delhi as such but nevertheless make us curious about it too!