The wistfulness that touches this outsider’s account was as nothing compared to the paroxysm of nostalgia that had taken over the city itself. In the years preceding Emma Roberts’ visit, the aristocracy of autumnal Shahjahanbad found much of its remaining purpose in the writing and appreciation of a poetry which expresses more extravagantly perhaps than any other the sweet pain of passing. It was written both in Persian, the language of the Mughal court, and in Urdu, a language indigenous to India that had arisen over the previous thousand or so years from the encounter of the Sanskritic Delhi dialect with the Persian, Arabic and Turkish of western invaders. In this sense this poetry bore a family resemblance to poetry from those invading lands, in which the transitory nature of the worldly — of love, beauty and pleasure — had been an established theme for centuries. It was a theme that spoke, ultimately, of the wrench of devotion: for the devout poet must live among the passing wonders of the temporal world, all the time knowing that he must ultimately retreat from them into eternity. But the travails of eighteenth-century India added to this philosophical disposition a particularly experiential edge. There is nothing metaphorical about the “desolation” in this poem by Mir Taqi Mir, who was forced to flee the city after another Persian sacking, this time in 1756; arriving in splendid Lucknow, he was greeted by robed poets who looked with disdain at his rags:
To which place do I belong? You, men of the East, ask
And taunt and tease a poor man.
Delhi, which was once a city unique in the world:
The chosen and the gifted made it home.
Now it has been razed and ruined by the hammer of fate.
I come from that desolation.16
It says much about the spirit of Delhi that this mood, this sense of living in the aftermath, has dominated the city’s literature until our own time. The capital of a fast-growing and dizzyingly populous nation it might be, but Delhi’s writers have consistently seen it as a city of ruins and they have directed their creativity to expressing that particular spiritual emaciation that comes from being cut off from one’s own past. This is both the reality and the fantasy of Delhi: the city is always already destroyed. The strange edge of desperation that the most distant outsiders seem to acquire when they come here derives from this — as if everyone becomes, by virtue of being in Delhi, a survivor, someone living on after the loss of everything they held dear. Maybe the present book, so apparently taken up with contemporary things, merely reproduces this ancient literary mood, for my ultimate experience of this city where nothing endures is also that of being bereft. Perhaps my father would say the same.
The high-flown regret of the eighteenth century was intensified into apocalypse some twenty years after Emma Roberts’ visit, when the magnificently senescent city about which she rhapsodised was definitively smashed by her compatriots.
By that time the major force in the sub-continent was the British East India Company, a massive monopoly engaged in the production and trade of commodities such as silk, cotton, indigo, saltpetre and opium. Such an enterprise required significant control over Indian land, labour and law, and, during the course of the eighteenth century, the corporation had engaged in ambitious military campaigns to achieve this, conquering much of the sub-continent and subduing the Marathas. The Mughal emperor had become a cipher: his own armies disbanded, he now lived in the Red Fort under the protection of the Company’s forces.
In 1857, the Delhi ‘sepoys’ — Indian soldiers serving in the Company’s armies, whose cantonments Roberts had seen from the Qutub Minar — joined in a sudden uprising against the Company administration. Sepoys in Delhi killed British soldiers and officials and took over the walled city. The British, shaken and terrified, regrouped, blew their way into the city with explosives and, after a devastating battle, suppressed the rebels. There followed an orgy of looting and revenge that terrified even the perpetrators. Tens of thousands of residents of the city were hung or shot, and many more fled. Though the uprising had involved Hindu and Muslim rebels equally, British reprisals were directed most severely against the latter, because they controlled the political establishment, and because there were fears of a holy war in the name of the Muslim emperor. The emperor was tried and exiled to Rangoon; several members of his family were executed. Most Muslim refugees were prevented from ever returning to Delhi; years later they were still squatting in ruined Mughal tombs to the south, exposed and dispossessed — some of them among the most cultivated and, until recently, the richest, people in the world. Shahjahanabad’s Mughal culture of gardens, harems, merchants and poetry was finished overnight.
Mirza Ghalib, a Muslim aristocrat, the greatest of Shahjahanabad’s many Urdu and Persian poets, described the aftermath of 1857 in his letters. Because of his affectionate relationship to the British, he had been allowed to stay in the city, but most of his friends had fled:
. . leaving behind them houses full of furnishings and treasures beyond price These… men of noble lineage had several houses and halls and palaces, all adjoining one another, and it is certain that if one measured the land on which they stood it would equal the area of a village, if not a town. These great palaces, left without a soul to attend them, were utterly looted and laid waste, though some of the less valuable, heavier things, such as the drapings of the large halls, and pavilions and canopies and… carpets, had been left as they were. Suddenly one night… these things caught fire. The flames rose high, and stone and timber, doors and walls, were all consumed by fire. These buildings lie to the west of my house, and are so near that from my roof at midnight I could see everything in the light of the leaping flames, and feel the heat on my face and the smoke in my eyes, and the ash falling on my body, for a westerly wind was blowing at the time. Songs sung in a neighbour’s house are, as it were, gifts which it sends; how then should not fire in a neighbour’s house send gifts of ashes?
About the princes no more than this can be said, that some fell victim to the rifle bullet and were sent into the jaws of the dragon of death, and the souls of some froze in the noose of the hangman’s rope, and some lie in prisons, and some are wanderers on the face of the earth.17
For Ghalib, the city was dead, and with it, its culture and even its languages. In clearing ground for their boulevards, barracks and military grounds, the British had destroyed not only houses and mosques but also priceless libraries, so that much of the physical record of Urdu literature had ceased to exist. The Muslim nobles who practised and patronised Urdu culture had disappeared too, and those who came to replace them were, as far as Ghalib was concerned, a barbaric rabble. Quoting a verse from a friend’s letter in praise of Urdu — “My friend, this is the language Delhi people speak” — he wrote terminally: