“Now I’m trying to improve my karma. I’ve stopped the business with prostitutes. I’ve given up meat. When your karma is good, you’ll automatically bump into people who are profitable to you. But when it is bad, you meet people who will fleece you. So I’m being a good person, trying to help people however I can. For instance, my favourite masseur came to the house. He wanted socks. So I gave him my socks. He’s a poor man: he comes every day and he gives me a full-body massage. Tomorrow if he wants a shirt, I’ll give him a shirt. You do whatever you can. Goodness is in circulation like money. The amount of good and bad in the world always remains the same. It neither increases nor decreases, it only changes hands. It is never yours: you are only the custodian. If you don’t use it, someone else will take it. If I do something good, I take the credit from you. You get minus, I get plus. It’s like a double credit. It is up to you to get as much as you can from other people. The only way to get it is to take it from other people because it is like money: it circulates with people. When I give socks to my masseur, I take his goodness from him.”
It is still subdued in the bar at this early hour of the evening, so it is difficult to ignore the man who shouts out to someone in the opposite corner, asking if he is going tonight to a dinner hosted by a prominent industrialist. He drops the name twice, loudly, and an elderly Sikh man stands up to protest.
“Cool it!” he calls out authoritatively. “We’re all invited to the same dinner. We don’t need to hear about it from you. If you want to come in here, learn how to behave!”
Eight 1857
My heart does not dwell in this ravaged land
Who can be happy in an unstable world?
…
Tell these regrets to go dwell somewhere else
Where is the space in this scorched heart?
— From a poem written in his final exile by Bahadur Shah Zafar, last Mughal emperor14
If Delhi was so particularly fearful of a loss of values, it was partly because the region in which it lay had had its values destroyed many, many times. For centuries it had lain in the path of invaders from the north and west who were drawn by the riches of the sub-continent, a fact which had lent fragility to all things, tangible and intangible. A saying is still preserved in some Punjabi families: “Jo khadda pitta apnaa, baki shahi daa” (“What is in your stomach is yours; the rest belongs to the invader”). Assume the worst, went the thinking, the better to survive: wealth will always be stolen away; just consume whatever you can so at least that part is not lost too. For many people, even those who profited from it, global capitalism was another of these foreign invasions, and while it did have people consuming madly, this did not quell the anxiety of loss.
It is common to talk about Delhi as an ancient city, beginning with its supposed origins as the city of Indraprastha described in the Mahabharata — but it is not strictly that. There is little physical continuity between the many cities of Delhi: none was incorporated organically into the next. Cities were sacked by invaders and left uninhabitable, or they ran out of water immediately after their construction and had to be abandoned — and stones were then carted from each of these settlements to build the next. Each time a new power came to this place, it shifted ground and built afresh, draining the last life out of what existed before and leaving it to decay. This singular discontent with the already existing did not end in modern times: the British built ‘new Delhi’ in the wilderness, and global capital started from scratch with Gurgaon. The spirit of this place has always been staccato, and full of fractures.
The greatest period of stability came under the Mughals, a dynasty originally from central Asia, whose legendary wealth and magnificence reached their height in the seventeenth century. It was at this time that the emperor Shah Jahan removed his capital from Agra and brought it to Delhi, where he built a new metropolis on the banks of the Yamuna river. Laid out over the ruins of a city sacked in the fourteenth century, this glistening paradise of domes and gardens sprang up, stupefyingly, in less than one decade. Nowadays this city — Shahjahanabad — is called ‘Old Delhi’, to distinguish it from ‘New Delhi’, the city built by the British after they moved their capital here in 1911; but in the days of its magnificence, it seemed that obsolescence could never visit such dewy bowers, such inordinate splendour, such implausible avenues, with their rose-water fountains, exquisite merchandise and royal processions.
But Mughal decline, when it came, was as steep as the ascent. During the eighteenth century, the emperor’s power dissolved amid royal infighting, corruption and military obsolescence; great parts of the empire, such as Hyderabad and Bengal, broke off into independence, and most of the rest was snapped up by the new sub-continental empire of the Maratha kings. Delhi was repeatedly attacked, most devastatingly in 1739, by the Persian imperial army which, under Nadir Shah, looted the city and slaughtered 20,000 of its inhabitants. This debacle demonstrated just how complete was the end of Mughal might: Nadir Shah returned to Persia with the Peacock Throne, built for Shah Jahan with over a tonne of pure gold and inset with 230 kilogrammes of gems, including the most famous in the world, the Koh-i-Noor diamond.
A century after that assault, an English traveller named Emma Roberts, standing atop the Qutub Minar, could see the dimmed effulgence of Shahjahanabad in the distance. In contrast to the enormous extent of what she called ‘old Delhi’ — the collapsed cities of the medieval dynasties (which she refers to collectively as the Pathans) and of the early Mughals — it could still, nonetheless, inspire awe:
The capital of the Mughal empire… the modern city, or Shahjahanabad, the designation by which it is distinguished by the natives, who have not yet fallen into the European habit of calling it New Delhi… stands in the centre of a sandy plain, surrounded on every side with the ruins of old Delhi, curiously contrasted with a new suburb, the villas belonging to Europeans attached to the residency, and with the cantonments lately erected for three regiments of sepoys… From the summit [of the Qutub Minar] the view is of the most sublime description; a desert, covered with ruins full of awful beauty, surrounds it on all sides, watered by the snake-like Yamuna, which winds its huge silvery folds along the crumbling remains of palaces and tombs. In the back-ground rise the dark lofty walls and frowning towers of an ancient fortress, the stronghold of the Pathan chiefs; and the eye, wandering over the stupendous and still beautiful fragments of former grandeur, rests at last upon the white and glittering mosques and minarets of the modern city, closing in the distance, and finely contrasting, by its luxuriant groves and richly flowering gardens, with the loneliness and desolation of the scene beneath.
Before the Mohammadan invasion, [this collection of collapsed cities] had been a place of great renown, many of the remains of Hindu architecture dividing the interest with those of the Muslim conquerors: the sepulchres of one hundred and eighty thousand saints and martyrs, belonging to the faithful, were, it is said, to be found amidst the wrecks of temples and palaces, before all had crumbled into the undistinguishable mass which now renders the greater part of the scene so desolate…
From the outside the view [of Shahjahanabad] is splendid; domes and mosques, cupolas and minarets, with the imperial palace frowning like a mountain of red granite, appear in the midst of groves of clustering trees, so thickly planted that the buildings have been compared, in Oriental imagery, to rocks of pearls and rubies, rising from an emerald sea. In approaching the city from the east bank of the Yamuna, the prospect realizes all that the imagination has pictured of Oriental magnificence; mosques and minarets glittering in the sun, some garlanded with wild creepers, others arrayed in all the pomp of gold, the exterior of the cupolas being covered with brilliant metal, and from Mount Mejnoon, over which a fine road now passes, the shining waters of the Yamuna gleaming in the distance, insulating Salimgarh, and disappearing behind the halls of the peacock-throne, the palace of the emperors, add another beautiful feature to the scene… [But] the glory of the Mughals has faded away, and their greatness departed… The celebrated gardens of Shalimar, with their cypress avenues, sparkling fountains, roseate bowers, and the delicious shade of their dark cedars, on which Shah Jahan, the most tasteful monarch in the world, is said to have lavished a crore of rupees (a million sterling), have been almost wholly surrendered to waste and desolation.15