Hazy Daze in Delhi

This journey began in Delhi ten days before the 2009 elections, five months after the Mumbai bombings. 

The Jet Air flight from the Gulf to Delhi was full, crammed with workers returning home at the end of their overseas contract.  There were two incoming tourists on the flight.

Delhi was hot, humid and very secure, if the sandbag gun emplacements outside the airport were any indication. 

The list of places to see was long, the time was short.    Adiga’s words from The White Tiger were still fresh:

Let the driver tell you the truth.  And the truth is that Delhi is a crazy city. ... all the roads look the same, all of them go around and around grassy circles in which men are sleeping or eating or playing cards, and then four roads shoot off from that grassy circle, and then you go down one road, and you hit another grassy circle where more men are sleeping or playing cards, and then four more roads go off from it. (Adiga, p. 99)

Therefore the Indian Tourist Bureau’s ability to provide a knowledgeable guide and an experienced driver for a reasonable price seemed a good idea.

The trip to India was sudden and unplanned so a map was bought, and plans made over dawn coffee in the hotel.

Maps are wonderful things.  They impose the mirage of order on chaos, encourage the traveller to believe in the accessibility of cities.  Lay a map of Delhi on the table, pencil over it a grid with Connaught Place in the centre.  There, with a little jiggling of the grid, Delhi can be divided up into a few days sightseeing.  Simple really. 

The guide was a shepherd through the mazes of security screens thrown up around any structure more than a metre high.  On this, the first day, Mughal monuments predominated so the guide was an expert in this field.  He also provided protection from the beggars, thin on the ground in the heat and dust.  Desperate touts formed phalanxes of invaders at the sight of rare tourists.  But all, beggars and touts, were remarkably polite - insistent, but polite. 

The number of armed police and soldiers patrolling the streets and lanes demonstrated that a safe tour of Delhi had come at an enormous cost to the Government of India. 

What a city Delhi is, the outcome of over 3,000 years of habitation, a complex, ugly, noisy city, battened down against attack from within and without, a city of parks and gardens and horrific slums.

Yet Delhi is a democratic city with all the trappings of democracy and the problems and corruption of the developing world.  It is a vibrant city where even in those tense pre-election days the optimism among its people was palpable.

It was, however, not politics but historical monuments that were the reason for this stopover. 

The driver knew which grassy circle led to which road.  And the first road led to the Jama Masjid, Shah Jahan’s Friday mosque, because this was not a Friday, and the mosque was open for visiting before the thick blanket of humidity swaddled the city and turned the mosque courtyard into a sauna. 

The Jama Masjid is the largest mosque in India.  Entrance to the mosque is free, but a ‘photography fee’ is charged.  Women must wear the floral covering provided at the entrance – an article of clothing so ugly that even if Bollywood stars Aishwarya Rai or Bipasha Basu were wearing it there is no risk any man would be overcome with lustful thoughts at the sight of them.

Shah Jahan completed the Red Fort in 1648 and then turned to the construction of a mosque opposite the fort. 

This large red sandstone structure was built on a rise on the Delhi plain on a base raised a further ten metres from the ground.  It is said that it took 10,000 men six years (1650-1656) to build.  Getting mosques up in a hurry seems to have been a aspect of the Mughal reign.  Aurangazeb, Shah Jahan’s son and ursurper, built the Badshahi Mosque, the biggest in the world for 313 years, in Lahore, in the two years between 1671 and 1673. 

In spite of the fort-like appearance of its exterior the mosque is interesting both architecturally and historically and a good example of the Mughal style. 

The three main domes are of white marble with accents of black.  The minarets also display innovative combinations of sandstone and marble.  The cool, arcaded cloisters with intricate marble facing were occupied mostly by sleeping men and beggars careful not to harass the tourists.

Two bomb explosions within the mosque in April 2006 aimed, apparently, at the then liberal minded Imam do not seem to have resulted in any over-zealous security – or at least what would be called over-zealous in security-minded Delhi.   

This Imam was, in accordance with tradition for the Jama Masjid, a direct descendant of the Imam invited from Bukhara by Shah Jahan to inaugurate his mosque on 23 July 1656. 

In City of Djinns after a visit to the Jama Masjid for Eid prayers Dalrymple wrote:   

...Islam has always been an urban faith, ill at ease with the wilderness; its civilization has always flourished most successfully in the labyrinths of the ancient bazaar towns of the East.  Certainly there can be no doubt that Islam looks at its most impressive in a great urban cathedral mosque, ...(p. 251)

His reflections were perhaps inspired not only by the sight of “twenty or thirty thousand” Muslim men at prayer, but also by the mosque’s proximity to the crowded lanes that lead to Chandni Chowk.  This former Mughal boulevard lead to the Red Fort.  Now it is the hot, noisy, congested main street of Old Delhi, which still leads to the massive citadel of Shah Jahan.

Observer

2^nd February 2010

Email:  longline8@gmail.com

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References:

Adiga, Aravind, The White Tiger, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2008.

Dalrymple, William, City of Djinns: A year in Delhi, Penguin, New Delhi, 2004.