ABSTRACT
In 1906, Gordon Hearn, a captain in the Royal Engineers of the British Indian Army and an associate of the Institute of Civil Engineers in India, published The Seven Cities of Delhi (Hearn 1906). Combining myth and reality, Hearn posits a ‘Hindu’ Delhi and a ‘Muslim’ Delhi as if they were two neatly divided historical eras with distinct affiliations of religious ideology. Despite aligning Delhi with the ‘Muslim empires’, he mentions the ‘Hindu King Yudisthir’ whose capital, Indraprastha, was supposedly located in the Purana Killa (Old Fort) region of the city (Hearn 1906: 68-85). Hearn, however, refutes the ‘myth of Indraprastha’ but does gesture towards Delhi as a city from ‘time immemorial’. Moreover, Hearn compares Delhi to Rome, and narrates the proverbial history of the Indian city, focusing on its architectural landmarks (Hearn 1906: 1). By stressing its built environment and erasing the people from his description of the city, he implicitly projects Delhi as a living museum of history. Hearn’s depiction of Delhi as both an ancient imperial centre of India and a living museum underlines the British conception of the city. The British retained the notion of Delhi as an imperial centre by making it the site of colonial ritual through much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The centrality of Delhi was repeatedly enacted by the British as they reinforced their claims as the legatee of the Mughal Empire. In 1876, the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII of Britain) was entertained at a ball in the Diwan-i-Khas (Hall of Special Audience) of the Mughal palace at Shahjahanabad within what came to be known as the ‘Red Fort’. The following year, the viceroy Lytton proclaimed Queen Victoria the Empress of India – not from Calcutta, the capital of British India, but from a durbar in Delhi. In 1903, the viceroy Curzon celebrated the coronation of Edward VII at a durbar in Delhi; in 1911 George V was crowned Emperor of India in Delhi. There, following Mughal tradition, he appeared for darshan, or viewing, on a balcony of the ‘Red Fort’ (Cohn 1983: 165-210). Importantly, the iteration of Delhi as the imperial power centre of India was coupled with its projection as a museum of India’s past. This owed largely to the selection of the city as the symbol of the lost empire by the leaders of the 1857 Rebellion, which had underlined the dangers of projecting it as a living embodiment of ‘India’. Consequently, the British emphasised the image of Delhi as a symbol of a past imperial tradition that could be re-enacted and re-lived only
through British imperial agency. This necessarily obscured from view the lived dimension of the city and transformed Delhi into a historical relic; a living museum of India’s past. This perception of Delhi – engendered by a certain territorialisation of Indian history by the colonisers – also informed the attitudes of the emergent nationalist elites of India between 1858 and 1911, the zenith of the British Empire. This chapter focuses on late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century travel accounts of Delhi by visitors from Calcutta, the quintessential ‘modern’ colonial city of India and Delhi’s urban antithesis. It argues that the Bengali middle-class viewed Delhi through the lens of colonial modernity and, following what Nicos Poulantzas has termed the ‘territorialization of history’, it contends that the Bengali middle class constructed a dialectical pairing of the spaces of Calcutta and Delhi.1 Early travellers from Calcutta perceived Delhi as a relic of Muslim authoritarianism, often dismissing it as antiquated in comparison to Calcutta’s modernity. Yet as the nineteenth century progressed, the material basis of the intelligentsia changed from that of portfolio capitalists to intermediate tenure holders who failed to become a hegemonic capitalist force in Bengal.2 As the Bengali middle class supplemented their incomes through work in the colonial bureaucracy, their identification of Calcutta with colonial modernity produced new doubts and a sense of alienation.3 Though Muslims remained a symbol of backwardness in these writings – a perspective undoubtedly characterised by their class position as landlords, that is, appropriators of the surplus produced by the predominantly Muslim Bengal peasantry – Delhi gradually emerged as the symbol of the glorious past of India. The cityscape of Delhi came to be seen as the graveyard of both Hindu and Muslim India, owing to the ravages of colonisation. This chapter examines representations of Delhi in a number of Bengali bhadralok travelogues. It begins by discussing Bholanath Chunder’s The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India (1869; hereafter, Travels), one of the first Indian travelogues written in English. Subsequently, it engages with Durgacharan Ray’s Debganer Martye Agaman (The Gods Visit Earth; hereafter, Gods) (1880), a farcical documentation of the travels of Hindu Gods across India. The chapter concludes by discussing Nabin Chandra Sen’s Prabasher Patra (Letters from Distant Lands; hereafter, Letters)4 (1892) and Dharanikanta Lahiri Chaudhuri’s Bharat Bhraman (Travels across India; hereafter, India) (1910). These texts devote considerable attention to Delhi and, importantly, demonstrate the divergent attitudes of Calcutta’s middle class towards that city. First, however, this chapter will briefly look at Delhi and Calcutta in the late nineteenth century under colonial rule. Delhi is located between the ridges that divide the Indus-centric Punjab plains and the Gangetic plains of north India. The history of the city’s urbanisation stretches back to 1052, under the Tomar ruler Anangpal. The seven cities within the region of Delhi achieved fame during the time of the Delhi Sultanate, established by Qutubuddin Aibak in 1206. Rai Pithora, the fort established by the Chauhan king Prithviraj in the twelfth century, became the centre of the city
during the early period of the Sultanate. In the later years, various Tughlaq monarchs established their own capital cities around their royal palaces. This early urbanisation impulse came to an end with the invasion of Timur in 1398 (Hambly 1986: 45-62). Subsequently, the Sayyid and Lodhi dynasties, Sher Shah Suri, and the Mughal kings all contributed to a renewed drive for urbanisation, which further contributed to the expansion and evolution of Delhi’s landscape. It was in 1648, however, that Delhi gained a new status when the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan completed the new, walled city of Shahjahanabad and made Delhi the capital of his empire. This remained the modern city of Delhi until the British ‘new’ Delhi was completed in 1931 under the guidance of Edwin Luytens and Herbert Baker. The final years of Shahjahanabad were characterised by ravages and plunders by both foreign and Indian conquerors, such as Nadir Shah in 1739, Ghulam Qadir Rohilla in 1787 and, finally, the British army, victorious after suppressing the 1857 Rebellion. The model of urbanisation in Delhi was driven primarily by the political impulses of ruling dynastic or capitalistic imperial regimes. Stephen Blake has focused on Shahjahanabad to highlight the symbolic significance of such a dynastic capital using his concept of ‘sovereign city’ (Blake 1991: 31-32), defined as the capital of a patrimonial bureaucratic empire that represents a particular early-modern state-building process in Asia (Blake 1991: 183). The sovereign city in micro-perspective, Blake notes, was an enormously extended patriarchal household of the emperor himself; the organisation and production of space within the city itself reflected the social and spatial organisation of the palace (Blake 1991: xxii-xiii). At a macro level, it was the kingdom in miniature. Drawing on Max Weber’s notion of ‘patrimonial realm’, Blake contends that in the political characterisation of state formation, the emperor extends personal patrimonial control over the space of the kingdom through a bureaucratic arrangement where the bureaucracy was loyal to the emperor through complex military, political and economic arrangements. Shahjahanabad as a ‘sovereign city’, then, was an urban spatial expression of such political authority where the city acted as axis mundi, with the palace symbolising the centre of cosmic order created and validated by the presence of the emperor himself. The idea of the Mughal state as patrimonial has been substantially revised by scholars such as Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Muzaffar Alam (Subrahmanyam & Alam 1998). However, the symbolic significance of Shahjahanabad can be asserted through the notion of loyalty not so much to the person but to the Mughal crown. The political culture of this symbolic capital of the early modern era thus provided Delhi with a special characteristic that owed particularly to the presence of the emperor as the symbolic head of the realm. Delhi retained this special status despite the eclipse of Mughal rule and the plunder of the city by Nadir Shah in 1739 and subsequently by Afghan chieftains. In 1803, the British general Lord Lake extended British sway over the city by replacing the Marathas as the custodians of the Mughal Emperor who, in reality, had authority only over his palace (Gupta 1981: 13). Under British protection, the city witnessed a social revival. The ‘White Mughals’ – to borrow William
Dalrymple’s evocative term – continued to support the cultural and academic fabric of Delhi, which witnessed the last efflorescence of the Indo-Persian Mughal culture (Dalrymple 2002).5 Many British officials became crucial participants in this process despite the gradual eclipse of orientalist scholars among the imperial bureaucratic elites. Despite the decline of the Mughal patrimonial bureaucratic empire, the city continued to survive as a living symbol of Mughal imperial culture with a benign British imperial benediction. This culture continued to seek the accommodation of diverse religious traditions within the Mughal imperial domain. It was during these years that the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar continued to ban the slaughter of cows while the British sought to allow it (Gupta 1981: 10). At this time the western-educated Mughal aristocrat Syed Ahmed Khan scaled the Qutub Minar not only to decipher the script on the tower but also to prove that it was originally built by a Hindu monarch. His work, Aasar us Sanadid (The Ruins of the Cities of Delhi) was a first of its kind. His article was subsequently published in the Archaeological Survey of India proceedings and brought him fame and government employment. Delhi thus remained a living symbol of the syncretic Mughal culture and is commemorated in the contemporary lyrics of Mirza Ghalib.6 In this sense it represented the early modern cultural framework of northern India. The 1857 Rebellion altered this balance of power. The British became convinced that Muslim aristocrats sought to restore the pre-eminence of the Mughal elites, while Delhi’s Hindu bankers were loyal to them. After quelling the 1857 Rebellion, the British army murdered the Mughal princes and sent Bahadur Shah Zafar into exile; they also systematically dismantled the Muslim aristocracy. Muslim households were plundered and the prize money found its way into the pockets of Delhi army soldiers. The Muslim residents of Shahjahanabad were evicted from their homes and not allowed to return for a decade. Further, parts of the fort were destroyed; barracks were set up to house the army while Mughal palaces were occupied by British officers; the Jama Mosque became an army storehouse, and the Akbarbadi Mosque was razed to the ground. The Fatehpuri Mosque was auctioned off to Chunna Mal, a Delhi banker who had been loyal to the British during the rebellion, and eventually gifted back to the Muslims during the Durbar of 1877. Likewise, the British replaced the old aristocratic elites of Delhi with bankers who came from Hindu and Jain money-lending families (Gupta 1981: 27, 73). These groups framed policies for the city and petitioned for the extension of the railways into Delhi. Between 1867 and 1878 the railways connected Delhi to Calcutta and the Punjab; this railway extension further destroyed Muslim habitations in the city. As colonial capitalism triumphed over the proto-capitalistic patrimonial bureaucratic imperium, the city was transformed into a town of commerce (Gupta 1981: 30, 39-49). In an ironic twist, Delhi came to be administered from Lahore, originally a city of provincial Mughal satraps. The new city became a museum of history for the tourists – British and Indian – brought in by the railways (Gupta 1981: 26-31). British taverns and hotels catered to tourists,
and Shahjahanabad, with its palaces, mosques and ruins, was transformed into a relic without a place in the colonial capitalist modernity of India. Delhi’s transformation from a sovereign city to a nondescript trading town was complete. This museum city – an instrument of nostalgia – reminded some visitors from Calcutta of oriental despotism; others perceived it as a graveyard of Indic civilisation.
