My good sir, “Delhi people” now means Hindus, or artisans, or soldiers, or Punjabis or Englishmen. Which of these speak the language which you are praising?… The city has become a desert, and now that the wells are gone and water is something rare and precious, it will be a desert like that of Karbala. My God! Delhi people still pride themselves on Delhi language! What pathetic faith! My dear man, when Urdu Bazaar is no more, where is Urdu? By God, Delhi is no more a city, but a camp, a cantonment. No Fort, no city, no bazaars, no watercourses.18
“It’s difficult to relate to the city of Delhi anymore,” says Sadia Dehlvi,* “especially to the people of Delhi.”
As a member of one of Delhi’s old and august Muslim families, Sadia still looks back to the culture mourned by Ghalib in the years after 1857 as her culture.
She has written several books about Sufism, a breed of Islamic mysticism that entered the sub-continent from Persia around 1200 and produced a particularly vibrant intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic culture in north India, drawing on, and in turn influencing, the traditions of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims alike. Such intermingling was facilitated by Sufism’s universalist current, which rejected as false the appearance of division and difference, and proclaimed that the ultimate good was one, without label or preference. Sufi mystics also liked to eschew the authority of priests, and developed a moral language that rejected external rules and codes, asserting that right behaviour originated from inner wisdom and conscience. Fondly remembered by liberals, especially from the older elite, Sufism is remembered today as north India’s now-departed aphrodisiac, which brought disparate groups together and spawned from their encounter a shared civilisation rich in music, philosophy and parables.
“One of the only places I really relate to, that I love from the core of my heart, is the shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya. It represents the continuity of the city, at least of the last 700 years: its culture, its soul, its language, its poetry. Go there today and you will see rich and poor, Hindu and Muslim, Indians and foreigners — because Hazrat Nizamuddin continues to foster a culture of equality just as he did in his lifetime.”
The fourteenth-century saint, Nizamuddin Auliya, is a towering figure in the history of Delhi, and one of the few personalities to supply any true coherence to its scattered history. The anniversary of Nizamuddin’s death still brings to his shrine pilgrims from all over north India, who sleep for a week on the streets around, cooking their meals on the sidewalks and sleeping, for safety, under the few hundred buses in which they have made their journey.
Preaching renunciation, love and the unity of all forms of spiritual life, Nizamuddin kept away from those in power and advised his followers to do the same, but he was an outspoken political commentator — not only excoriating rulers for injustice but also praising them for wise government; he said, for instance, of the sultan Iltutmish that “more than his wars or his conquests, it is with the water supply he has built for the people of Delhi that he has won his place in heaven.” Most conspicuously, perhaps, Nizamuddin Auliya was instrumental in fostering, through his disciple Amir Khusrau the ecstatic music form known as ‘qawwali’, which fused Indian, Arabic and Persian styles of music to bring novelty to the music assemblies at Nizamuddin’s hospice. Qawwali became the characteristic form of Sufi devotional expression, one that dismayed orthodox Muslims because it was self-consciously pluralistic, drawing on older, Hindu, styles of music and poetry, and thus establishing a spiritual community that crossed religious divides. To this day, qawwalis are sung at Nizamuddin’s shrine every Thursday evening by some of the same families whose ancestors were trained in the art by Amir Khusrau 700 years ago.
Sadia’s house is in nearby Nizamuddin East, part of the neighbourhood named after the saint, an area of parks and blossoms, whose dreamy views of Mughal tombs and aristocratically unfashionable shops endear it to foreign newspaper correspondents.
“My family has been in Delhi since the days of the emperor Shah Jahan. We were successful merchants, and we owned almost the whole of Sadar Bazaar, where we controlled much of the wholesale trade. We had our own law courts: we didn’t use the British courts. Even now my family avoids filing cases in the official legal system.”
Sadia’s remark about legal processes also says much about the currents from which she has emerged. In the wake of its arrival, British law was regarded by the Mughal establishment as a foreign, godless and illegitimate imposition, and Sufi mystics instructed their followers that they had no moral responsibility to tell the truth in British courts. Sadia’s family seems to have lived ever since on the leeward side of this historical breach.
The strength of feeling directed against the British legal system, and the fact that it never secured widespread assent in north India, had to do, indeed, with its failure to acknowledge such local sources of moral authority as the Sufis. Part of the social power of Sufism in the Mughal period derived from the fact that it acted as a democratising political force: Sufi saints enjoyed such popular prestige that they could act as a curb on the unfettered power of the Mughal throne. Emperors consulted them on ethical and political matters, and were reluctant to go against their word, which carried the force of the universal. In this way was established a recognisably consensual mechanism for just rule, in what was otherwise a dictatorship.
More recent legal systems, from the British onwards, have of course provided less space for such kinds of intermediaries. And still today, when the political and legal establishment is often seen as corrupt, self-serving and removed from the needs of ordinary people, there is a widespread hankering for fearless, saintly figures who might speak to rulers with cosmic authority, and change everything in a word.
“When I grew up, our house was always full of music and poetry. My family ran a publishing house: we published many magazines in Urdu and Hindi, including a famous Urdu cultural magazine called Shama; it had a huge circulation and we were very well-known. We had a beautiful bungalow where all the poets and film stars used to come. There was no cultural figure of any importance who did not spend time at our house. Writers and artists like Ismat Chughtai, Qurratulain Haider, Amrita Pritam, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Gulzar, M.F. Hussain, Satish Gujral, and many others. Films stars such as Nargis Dutt, Raj Kapoor, Meena Kumari, Dilip Kumar, Dharmendra…
“With the collapse of Urdu, our magazines folded one by one. We sold our ancestral home some years ago. That was the house my family settled in when they came from the old city; it was the house where I was born. It was bought by Mayawati, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.
“I am not interested in trying to revive the family business. That era has gone. I am happy with my own. I am happy to focus on what is inside me and to write on spirituality. Ours is a wonderful city, a modern city: I don’t want to be negative. But our soul is affected. Something has snapped. I can’t identify it.”
And indeed perhaps it is unidentifiable, this thing that has snapped. Perhaps it derives not from an event but from some condition of the city, this feeling that everything meaningful has already been destroyed — for Sadia’s lament is almost comically similar in content to those of Ghalib a century and a half before.
“How do you expect Delhi to care about its own history when no one can read the languages it is written in? Its entire history is written in Urdu and Persian. The government deliberately killed Urdu after 1947 because they treated it as a Muslim language. But Urdu had nothing to do with religion: it was the language of Delhi, of everyone in Delhi. Pakistan took Urdu for its national language, but Urdu did not originate in any region of Pakistan. I mourn the loss of the language more than anything else. When you want to destroy a people, you take away their language.