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Authors: M.G. Vassanji
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of fine pottery called Painted Grey Ware—dating to about 1000 BC , but nothing so exotically wonderful as to have belonged to the Indraprastha of the Mahabharata . But then, what inspired the poet who described Indraprastha so opulently, and when did he write?
Lying alongside the Jumna river, at the end of a corridor between the Himalayan range to the north and the Rajasthan desert to the south and west, Delhi became the prize of many an invader from the north and west. The rest of India lay before it, so to speak, inviting conquest and plunder. In Delhi, the Turks from Central Asia began the long era of Muslim rule over India, the great Mughal empire reached its zenith, declined, and fell, and the British ruled over the jewel of an empire over which the sun finally set. Here Mahatma Gandhi, still grieving the breakup of the country in the horror of Partition following the country’s independence from Britain, was assassinated; and from here the charismatic public-school and Cambridge-educated Jawaharlal Nehru presided as India’s first prime minister during the heyday of Nonalignment and the Cold War.
A growing metropolis of increasing millions, streets packed with buses, auto-rickshaws, Marutis, and other, newer car models, the air heavily polluted, immense hoardings looming over the traffic, advertising the two competing colas, Bollywood films, computers, wireless providers, the focus here is on the now and the future. And so if one came expecting history to leap out from the sidewalks, as I did first, as one might in London or Paris—where history is organized and preserved and documented for the visitor not only in the public buildings but also in the grand museums—one is disappointed. I recall my visit to the Jantar Mantar observatory on my first day in Delhi and coming out feeling empty. Monuments there are in plenty, a thousand years’ worth of them, a few of them prized and showcased, but most decaying or lost or known only to a few, and all surrounded with an ironic sense of detachment from much of the populace.
Perhaps this is because Delhi has always been seen as a city invaded, in wave after wave of conquest, and built over and extended and moved over time; perhaps also because it is a city of recent refugees—and one could argue that the most recent invasion of Delhi was by the Punjabi refugees who bitterly left their ancestral homes in the land that became Pakistan and arrived in train-loads in this city and radically changed its nature. So Delhi’s past is not what everyone takes pride in, claims as his or her own. History is selective, discontinuous. If you see the city as having been invaded by foreign Muslim conquerors whose descendants are now Pakistanis, then its monuments, if they don’t bring up bile, mean nothing to you.
“We’re living off an inheritance,” a well-respected restoration architect tells me. “We’ve inherited many buildings but built few ourselves.” An unfair assessment, perhaps, and dated, in this rapidlychanging city. But as if to illustrate that statement, during my first visit I was driven through the “New Delhi” built by the British, in an area of lush lawns and gardens and wide tree-lined avenues, past Rashtrapati Bhavan, the once viceregal now presidential palace, the parliament buildings (“gift of the Britishers,” a guidebook explained), Claridges Hotel, and residences of the ruling elite. “In this area Indians were not allowed once,” my host, Krishan Chander, smiled. I wondered if there was any method in his choice of only these sites for me to see. None of the Mughal monuments, nothing pre-British, apparently, excited him. This was his fixed itinerary for visitors from abroad, what he thought would impress them. He was, as I later learned, one of the refugees of Partition. For his pièce de résistance he took me to the Diplomatic Enclave, in the posh area called Chanakya Puri, containing broad leafy streets named after grand rulers of the
Lying alongside the Jumna river, at the end of a corridor between the Himalayan range to the north and the Rajasthan desert to the south and west, Delhi became the prize of many an invader from the north and west. The rest of India lay before it, so to speak, inviting conquest and plunder. In Delhi, the Turks from Central Asia began the long era of Muslim rule over India, the great Mughal empire reached its zenith, declined, and fell, and the British ruled over the jewel of an empire over which the sun finally set. Here Mahatma Gandhi, still grieving the breakup of the country in the horror of Partition following the country’s independence from Britain, was assassinated; and from here the charismatic public-school and Cambridge-educated Jawaharlal Nehru presided as India’s first prime minister during the heyday of Nonalignment and the Cold War.
A growing metropolis of increasing millions, streets packed with buses, auto-rickshaws, Marutis, and other, newer car models, the air heavily polluted, immense hoardings looming over the traffic, advertising the two competing colas, Bollywood films, computers, wireless providers, the focus here is on the now and the future. And so if one came expecting history to leap out from the sidewalks, as I did first, as one might in London or Paris—where history is organized and preserved and documented for the visitor not only in the public buildings but also in the grand museums—one is disappointed. I recall my visit to the Jantar Mantar observatory on my first day in Delhi and coming out feeling empty. Monuments there are in plenty, a thousand years’ worth of them, a few of them prized and showcased, but most decaying or lost or known only to a few, and all surrounded with an ironic sense of detachment from much of the populace.
Perhaps this is because Delhi has always been seen as a city invaded, in wave after wave of conquest, and built over and extended and moved over time; perhaps also because it is a city of recent refugees—and one could argue that the most recent invasion of Delhi was by the Punjabi refugees who bitterly left their ancestral homes in the land that became Pakistan and arrived in train-loads in this city and radically changed its nature. So Delhi’s past is not what everyone takes pride in, claims as his or her own. History is selective, discontinuous. If you see the city as having been invaded by foreign Muslim conquerors whose descendants are now Pakistanis, then its monuments, if they don’t bring up bile, mean nothing to you.
“We’re living off an inheritance,” a well-respected restoration architect tells me. “We’ve inherited many buildings but built few ourselves.” An unfair assessment, perhaps, and dated, in this rapidlychanging city. But as if to illustrate that statement, during my first visit I was driven through the “New Delhi” built by the British, in an area of lush lawns and gardens and wide tree-lined avenues, past Rashtrapati Bhavan, the once viceregal now presidential palace, the parliament buildings (“gift of the Britishers,” a guidebook explained), Claridges Hotel, and residences of the ruling elite. “In this area Indians were not allowed once,” my host, Krishan Chander, smiled. I wondered if there was any method in his choice of only these sites for me to see. None of the Mughal monuments, nothing pre-British, apparently, excited him. This was his fixed itinerary for visitors from abroad, what he thought would impress them. He was, as I later learned, one of the refugees of Partition. For his pièce de résistance he took me to the Diplomatic Enclave, in the posh area called Chanakya Puri, containing broad leafy streets named after grand rulers of the
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