Enigmas to Uncover
Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai
Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.
EDWARD FITZGERALD, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
BECAUSE DELHI WAS THE FIRST CITY where I landed, I have always returned to it; from here I have departed for various places, and here I always return, before heading back to Canada. I am unsettled by nature, and yet I am a creature of habit. I abhor changes and moving, yet I long to get away. My continual returning to India through Delhi reflects perhaps, in some convoluted way, this dual nature.
Bombay, which was the traditional landing place for my people and synonymous with India in my childhood, and the setting of many a popular film and song, has an infectious rhythm and colour; it is a city cluttered with life and a pleasure to walk in; much is written about it. Delhi, on the other hand, more open and expansive, is not the stuff of movies; it is both older and newer, has been so for at least a thousand years. And the more recent newer Delhi has all the character of a suburban sprawl. But Delhi in its traditional sense, said the right way, evokes the mystique of history, and old poetry, reminders of empires rising and falling; it carries images of wars and marauding armies, echoes dimly with the clash of steel, the roll of cannon, the thunder of horses. It was the seat of the so-called Muslim rule in India and, recently, of a modern right-wing nationalist government drawing much rhetorical strength, if not the poison of communal hatred, from allusions to that rule. Not only were the last Mughals defeated here by the British, the last emperor exiled ignominiously to faraway Burma and his family destined to live in poverty, but thousands of Muslims fled Delhi during the partition of India (called, simply, “Partition,” all its horrors implied), headed for the newly formed nation of Pakistan. Hindus travelled the opposite way, bringing the bitterness of exile and loss and violence with them into the new developments of Delhi. Up to half a million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs are said to have perished in the slaughter that accompanied Partition. Every monument here therefore gives pause for thought, a squirm of the mind: How does one respond? Does that put a label on one? Isn’t there a neutral, intellectual, dispassionate way to respond to the history? Delhi, for me, always raises questions. Once, upon telling a taxi driver to take me to the Mughal emperor Humayun’s tomb, a grand monument amidst a splendid garden, all of it recently renovated, he lied, “Why go there, there’s nothing there but an empty roundabout.” Immediately I craned my neck to identify the telltale markers of his faith in the stickers on his dashboard, the hangings on his mirror. And felt guilty afterwards for my suspicion.
Within the area now called Delhi, many an old Delhi (the canonical number is seven) rose and fell into neglect and ruin, a monument to a ruler’s ambition, a lesson in the transience of empire and dynasty. The heroes of the great Indian epic the Mahabharata, the five Pandava brothers, are thought to have held court here, some three thousand years ago, in a city they had built called Indraprastha. The city is described in great detail in the Mahabharata, as grand and wonderful, with “well-planned streets, magnificent white buildings, pavilions, pleasure hillocks, ponds, lakes, and tanks [reservoirs]. It was surrounded by beautiful gardens where trees of many kinds blossomed and bore fruit and where the air resounded with the call of peacocks and cuckoos…. From here Yudhisthira [the eldest of the Pandavas] ruled over his realm, cultivating among his subjects dharma (righteousness), artha (material well-being), and kama (the satisfaction of sensual pleasure).” Among the magnificent buildings was a great hall which had golden pillars and was studded with precious stones. The details seem fantastical, but that might well be poetic licence. Did the descriptions have a basis in fact? Apparently not. A covered archaeological dig at Purana Qila, the Old Fort, is perhaps the site of ancient Indraprastha. Archaeologists who have dug at this site and at others connected with or mentioned in the epic have indeed found ancient artifacts—shards of fine pottery called Painted Grey Ware—dating to about 1000 BC, but nothing so exotically wonderful as to have belonged to the Indraprastha of the Mahabharata. But then, what inspired the poet who described Indraprastha so opulently, and when did he write?
Lying alongside the Jumna river, at the end of a corridor between the Himalayan range to the north and the Rajasthan desert to the south and west, Delhi became the prize of many an invader from the north and west. The rest of India lay before it, so to speak, inviting conquest and plunder. In Delhi, the Turks from Central Asia began the long era of Muslim rule over India, the great Mughal empire reached its zenith, declined, and fell, and the British ruled over the jewel of an empire over which the sun finally set. Here Mahatma Gandhi, still grieving the breakup of the country in the horror of Partition following the country’s independence from Britain, was assassinated; and from here the charismatic public-school and Cambridge-educated Jawaharlal Nehru presided as India’s first prime minister during the heyday of Nonalignment and the Cold War.
A growing metropolis of increasing millions, streets packed with buses, auto-rickshaws, Marutis, and other, newer car models, the air heavily polluted, immense hoardings looming over the traffic, advertising the two competing colas, Bollywood films, computers, wireless providers, the focus here is on the now and the future. And so if one came expecting history to leap out from the sidewalks, as I did first, as one might in London or Paris—where history is organized and preserved and documented for the visitor not only in the public buildings but also in the grand museums—one is disappointed. I recall my visit to the Jantar Mantar observatory on my first day in Delhi and coming out feeling empty. Monuments there are in plenty, a thousand years’ worth of them, a few of them prized and showcased, but most decaying or lost or known only to a few, and all surrounded with an ironic sense of detachment from much of the populace.
Perhaps this is because Delhi has always been seen as a city invaded, in wave after wave of conquest, and built over and extended and moved over time; perhaps also because it is a city of recent refugees—and one could argue that the most recent invasion of Delhi was by the Punjabi refugees who bitterly left their ancestral homes in the land that became Pakistan and arrived in train-loads in this city and radically changed its nature. So Delhi’s past is not what everyone takes pride in, claims as his or her own. History is selective, discontinuous. If you see the city as having been invaded by foreign Muslim conquerors whose descendants are now Pakistanis, then its monuments, if they don’t bring up bile, mean nothing to you.
“We’re living off an inheritance,” a well-respected restoration architect tells me. “We’ve inherited many buildings but built few ourselves.” An unfair assessment, perhaps, and dated, in this rapidly changing city. But as if to illustrate that statement, during my first visit I was driven through the “New Delhi” built by the British, in an area of lush lawns and gardens and wide tree-lined avenues, past Rashtrapati Bhavan, the once viceregal now presidential palace, the parliament buildings (“gift of the Britishers,” a guidebook explained), Claridges Hotel, and residences of the ruling elite. “In this area Indians were not allowed once,” my host, Krishan Chander, smiled. I wondered if there was any method in his choice of only these sites for me to see. None of the Mughal monuments, nothing pre-British, apparently, excited him. This was his fixed itinerary for visitors from abroad, what he thought would impress them. He was, as I later learned, one of the refugees of Partition. For his pièce de résistance he took me to the Diplomatic Enclave, in the posh area called Chanakya Puri, containing broad leafy streets named after grand rulers of the past and grand philosophies, and showed me the Canadian High Commission. “Home!” he announced with a wide grin. It could be a touch of irony, cruel, but it wasn’t. He seemed sincere in his belief that the place would remind me of home. If only home were such a simple matter. During my second day in the country, as I recall, he had taken me for a returned Indian and left me to negotiate on my own the vast, bewildering New Delhi railway station.
On a train to Shimla, once, I sat across from two young women very diligently eating chappati and daal with their hands, from a package bought at a station. Something in their accent, something in their reserve, suggested they could only be Canadian. Yet they did not have that ubiquitous badge that many Canadian travellers carry, a Canadian flag, a red maple leaf sewn prominently on their luggage somewhere. A family of Gujarati tourists with two very indulged kids tried to convince one of the girls that it was all right to throw trash out the window, and she, after hesitating for some time, finally chucked her refuse out. I am not used to it, she explained, we are taught to throw garbage only in bins. The Gujarati woman smiled. We have a lot to learn from you, she said. The girl came from Canada, she said. Only then, I, who am usually reticent with strangers, felt I had a claim to them. I spoke to them about where they came from, where I lived. They were students in Kingston, in fact, which city I had to visit immediately after my return. But I was right in another respect also: very soon the girls produced Canadian pins, with the maple leaf at the head, and handed them out. They were eagerly accepted by all the passengers around.
But here in Delhi, excepting the monuments and the size of the city, so much actually reminds me of another home, in East Africa, across the Indian Ocean. The residential streets in many areas look exactly like those in the Indian areas of the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam of my childhood: the flower bushes in bungalow gardens, the mango trees giving wide shade; the two-storey apartment blocks of brick and cement, painted a simple white or light colour; the people outside them, vegetable sellers and their customers, the school kids. The pace of life, the background sounds. And inside the houses, the one-or two-bedroom cluttered interiors, the photo of a deceased family elder in prime place, objects displayed in glass cabinets, the essentially modest furniture and facilities. All this, so familiar as to take the breath away.
I recall a scene in suburban Delhi; this was later, during a family visit to India. We had taken a bus from our guest house in South Delhi to go to Connaught Circus, the heart of New Delhi. On the way we passed certain residential areas of the city, and glancing at my wife I saw a sudden emotion come over her face. She, who had not been back to Dar es Salaam in over twenty years, was reminded of it by the neighbourhoods we passed through. Such is the meaning of home. How could I possibly explain this to Krishan Chander, whose one ambition seems to be to send at least one of his children “there”? And if he succeeds, would he then go and stare nostalgically at the Canadian High Commission or the American Embassy?
Krishan Chander teaches English at one of the colleges that make up the massive University of Delhi system, though speaking to him one might not quite guess his specialty, and watching him operate reminds one more of a broker. Krishan Chander is an organizer, a doer, conferences are his métier, and although he complains that they take away from his scholarship, one is hard put to believe that. This occupation gives him privilege and status. His specialty is Canada, and to prove his loyalty he wears a maple-leaf pin in the manner of many Ontario civil servants, identical to the ones I saw the two Canadian girls giving away on the train to Shimla. He goes about from city to city all over the country, a latter-day evangelist for a little-known faith, offering as ultimate prize a trip to that paradise in the north. Many a hapless scholar has been caught in his honey trap.
Every evening after nine the telephone will start ringing in Krishan Chander’s cluttered living room, and picking it up he is connected to the world. I have often imagined him as a minor Indian god, sitting cross-legged like Gandhi, cheerful as a Ganesh, well-worn address book on his lap, telephone to his ear. Calls will come from other “centres” all across the country; from stranded foreign visitors; from would-be conference participants; from his typist or travel agent; even from the Canadian High Commission. You can call him at any hour of the day or night, certain of his attention. He will settle quarrels, budgets, itineraries. Every morning before he leaves the house he will again pick up his phone and his tattered book and begin dialing. He will not be rushed, attending to every item on his agenda one at a time. It is the only way, with his harried schedule. Finally he will come out of the house, looking distracted, his clothes already crumpled, his oiled hair curling up at the ears. A man with a passion, and a smile on his face. He will get out his Maruti, close the iron gate of the house (with its special “Canadian” guest room), and, toot-tooting, speed away past cows and pedestrians to the day’s appointments.
He goes by a simple principle, driving the Maruti around on the clogged streets of Delhi. He uses this system, as every other driver seems to do, in place of a rear-view mirror, right and left turn signals, stop lights: oblivious to any danger, he will scoot through a turn as I hold my breath, or through a crossroads, his horn happily blaring; this happy-fierce toot-toot gives him licence, a right, and he uses it effectively, though I wonder for how long. The car already has several dents, blamed on his family learning to drive. There is a simple method, apparently, to negotiating Delhi traffic, and it involves pushing through, struggling ahead as best as you can. Every space of likely advantage, however small, is contended for. At every instant a victor emerges, goes forward, the loser relents, is at it again. The horn is a welcome sign, warning others and announcing yourself, deafening to the visitor. Trucks cheerfully tell you on their backs, “Blow Horn,” in addition to a prayer to the Mother Goddess, and a pithy proverb: “O you with the dirty look, your face be black.”
“Whom do the cows belong to?” I asked Krishan Chander on my first visit. A great smile came over his face. The question had been put to him before. One of his foreign visitors had written a poem to the cows of Delhi, he said. I had guessed that perhaps they belonged to homes in the neighbourhood. They belonged to no one, Krishan told me. They are simply tolerated. One finds them plodding along in the thick of traffic, getting the blare of horns like everything else on the road, very much of the place and belonging. One finds them sitting right in the middle of a street, cars going past on either side, in both directions. One finds them scavenging the garbage dumps. At times they are angrily pushed aside, shouted at, as when one of them picks up an onion outside a store and ambles innocently away. They are a part of street life, as much as a beggar, a stray dog, a rickshaw, a man or woman crossing the road at a construction site bearing a load of bricks, traffic patiently waiting. And one sees cow droppings all over the residential streets, seemingly unnoticed and prudently avoided, like a rock or stump on the road.
In recent times, though, a globalized Krishan has moved on to consultancy and world travelling. He’s recently been to Pakistan, seen the place of his birth. A grownup child is already “there,” in the U.S. But while in Delhi he is still always available to assist, now on his cell phone, at home and on the road.
History is addictive, is an obsession, I’ve discovered. There’s so much around, layers to peel back, enigmas to uncover. I’ve seen the monuments, the Qutb complex, Humayun’s tomb, Red Fort; been driven past the odd mound or dome, remnants of a lost age; read bits of description and history. All dutifully accomplished. Registered in passing. But the urge persists, and grows, to step into the past, look behind the ruin, the beauty, the enigma—and find coherence, impute meaning and relevance. It’s risky, I know, a little like walking into a dream.
Why this obsession with the past? I can only conclude that it reflects the deep dissatisfaction of unfinished, incomplete migrations, a perpetual homelessness in my life. My colonial existence—in which memory and the past were trampled upon in a rush to better our lot—and the insecurities of an unorthodox communal culture, in the process of extinction and reinvention by the exigencies of globalized living and modern politics, have both created an uncontrollable and perhaps vain desire to know and record who I am. There are the ways of the mystic and the scientist, to answer this question; and there is the way of history and fiction, which I find more compelling. In how I connect to the history I learn about myself.
The axis of Delhi is oriented north-south. The legendary many cities of Delhi were often simply extensions one of another, in proximity to the Jumna river, each new Delhi generally to the north of the previous one, so as to benefit first from the cooling winds during the torrid dry summer. And so some of the oldest surviving monuments, the earliest Delhis, can be found among the suburbs in the south. The British, however, after much debate reversed this trend and built their Imperial Indian capital, New Delhi, in 1912, adjacent to what was then the current Delhi (called Shahjahanabad) and to its south. Since then the southwards trend has continued.
The noted English surgeon Frederick Treves, famous for his friendship with Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, and also imperial traveller, happened to visit Delhi in 1906 and gave a fine panoramic description of the landscape, looking out from the then Delhi, southwards from Delhi Gate:
There lies, to the south of Delhi…a desolate plain covered with the ruin and wreckage of many cities. For miles it wanders, telling ever the one woeful story of the hand of the destroyer. This country of things-that-were has been swept by a hundred armies, has heard the roar of a thousand battles, and none can tell the number of the dead who have lain stark among its stones….
From the Delhi Gate a road starts across this desert and reaches to a kindly and wholesome land beyond. The road is straight, and it leads through a country of stones and dust….
Those who follow this melancholy track will pass by miles of ruins, by walls with breaches, shreds of turrets and relics of gates, by crumbling domes rent with cracks…, by tottering pillars and half-seen vaults, and by prostrate blocks of matted stone which were bastions or buttresses.
Only six years later, on this landscape of broken old cities and a few straggling villages, was built New Delhi, covering incidentally much of the site of the ancient capital Indraprastha. After Independence, the growth of the city has continued southwards, on and around the ruins, and people will tell you that the newest Delhi is far south of the oldest Delhi, in the burgeoning modern satellite towns of Gurgaon and Noida, beneficiaries of India’s new globalized economy, with their spanking-new air-conditioned industrial parks, shopping malls, and housing developments, where the nouveau riche professionals can live in (Western) style.
But it is not the modern glass, steel, and concrete—which could be transplants from anywhere—but those silent ancient stone structures and their haunting echoes of tumultuous times past that draw the breath, at least of this visitor. Are they relevant? Of course they are; history is always relevant. An awareness of the past runs like lava beneath the surface of life here. The prompt for the outbreak of communal violence that took place in 1993 in Bombay and parts of Gujarat, and its follow-up, the one in Gujarat in 2002, was the destruction of a sixteenth-century mosque built by the Mughal emperor Babur, allegedly upon the site of the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. During communal conflicts Muslims are to this day anachronistically and erroneously jeered with cries of “Babur’s progeny” and “Turk.” In a happier, secular vein, modern India needs a capital worthy of its status and ambitions, and where else to look for the requisite imperial grandeur and gravity than in the abundant evidence of its rich history. No wonder, then, that restorers can be seen toiling away at the monuments as never before. “Heritage building” is a term gaining currency, and not only in Delhi.
In 1192, Delhi, then a city in a Rajput kingdom of the north, fell to the armies of Muhammad of Ghur, a region in the western part of the area we now know as Afghanistan, and the era of so-called Muslim rule began in Delhi, from whence it proceeded to the rest of India. There were, to be sure, Muslims living in various parts of India before 1192: Arab traders and settlers in the cities all along the western coast, having arrived by sea; ambassadors at various courts; Sufis from Persia and Central Asia. There had been other incursions by Muslim rulers from the north. But this particular conflict changed everything, for the conquerors had come to stay. The remains of the medieval Rajput city can be found in a few fragments of a rubble wall in southern Delhi; those of the conquerors’ city are at the Qutb complex, at which the red sandstone tower called Qutb Minar rises resplendently.
It is always instructive to remind oneself of this obvious fact: The boundaries and names of many places are only recent in origin and often hide richer, more complex truths than one might imagine; the past then becomes inconvenient and slippery, far less easy to generalize.
In this respect it is useful to know that southeastern Afghanistan was culturally and politically closer to South Asia than to the Near East, a fact evident to this day in its chaotic porous mountain border with Pakistan; Kabul is less than a hundred miles from Peshawar. Before the partition of India it was not unusual to see Afghans plying their trades in northern India. Kipling’s famous spy on the road, Mahbub Ali, was an Afghan horse trader. At the same time, many of India’s peoples have originated in the north. And in ancient times, the Maurya empire, based in present-day north India, had embraced parts of Afghanistan, where it brought Buddhism, which survived many centuries. The great Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 as un-Islamic, were from the fifth century AD.
Islam arrived in the region of Afghanistan in the seventh century, but it took a slow hold on the land, as people still clung to their pre-Islamic traditions. Politically the region consisted of changing frontiers and fortunes under rival Turkish dynasties often at war. Descended from the nomadic tribes of the lands north of the Oxus river, the Turks had been brought into the Islamic domains as slaves and converted, and rose among the ranks in the armies. From Baghdad in the west to Bukhara (in central Asia) in the east, they were the warrior class of the Islamic world, just as the Kshatriyas were the warrior caste among the Indians. From the tenth century onwards, most of the ruling dynasties of the Muslim world were Turkish in origin, just as the ruling dynasties of northern India were Rajput Kshatriya. The battles for Delhi (1191–92) were therefore fought by these two warrior peoples, the Turks and the Rajputs.
The story of the “Muslim conquest” of India must begin, however, with a larger-than-life character called Mahmud of Ghazna (a city on the Kabul–Kandahar road). In a chaotic, fragmented Afghanistan, in 998 AD, Mahmud came to power and began a series of conquests to build up a large empire stretching from Persia to present-day Pakistan. In his homeland he is celebrated as a great conqueror—he never lost a battle in forty years of ceaseless warfare—and as a pious and cultured ruler, who brought the best poets, artists, and scholars to his court. (One of his acquisitions was Alberuni, a Persian scientist and scholar, who spent ten years in India, learned Sanskrit, and wrote one of the most important and comprehensive accounts ever attempted of life in India.) In India, however, Mahmud of Ghazna’s reputation derives largely from his conquests. In 999, Mahmud was designated a sultan by the Caliph of Islam, considered the representative of the Prophet, whose seat was in Baghdad. Upon this prestigious endorsement the Turk took a vow to wage holy war against the Hindus every year. Starting in the year 1000, up to 1030, when he died, Mahmud made at least seventeen incursions into India; his most infamous act was the destruction and plunder of the wealthy temple of Somnath by the Arabian Sea. The name of Mahmud of Ghazna, therefore, is emblematic of the destructiveness of temple-razing Muslim sultans and tops the historical hate list of present-day Hindu nationalists. Only after him on that list comes Muhammad of Ghur.
Mahmud never stayed in India; his base remained at Ghazna, capital of his empire and (now known as Ghazni) still important today. His empire was finally overrun in 1150 by the sultans of Ghur.
The background of Ghur, too, defies easy generalization. Lying in the central west of the region amidst high mountain ranges, Ghur was a land not easily accessible to conquest. The intrepid Mahmud subdued it only by feigning a retreat. Orthodox Islam also faced hard going against a residual Buddhism, and Mahmud had to appoint teachers to bring an acceptable Islam to the people of Ghur. A sect called Karami, with beliefs and practices strongly influenced by centuries of Buddhism, was prevalent in the region. In their newly Islamic beliefs, the Karamis substituted the idea of Buddha on his lotus throne with a similar, corporeal Allah. Even the notoriously unorthodox Ismailis tried to gain a foothold here. It might be argued that their idea of a godlike Imam bore resemblance to the Karamis’ God. Muhammad of Ghur, the eventual conqueror of northern India, was possibly a Karami before converting to the Hanafi Sunni school.
In 1191, after a series of military campaigns in the north, Muhammad of Ghur arrived on the plains of Tarain, some ninety miles from Delhi, where he faced a confederacy of Rajput Indian forces which had gathered to check his advance.
The Rajputs had dominated northern India through a number of independent, competing kingdoms. At the time of Muhammad’s invasion, Delhi was a city in an important Rajput kingdom based at Ajmer and ruled by Prithviraj III, also called Rai Pithora. In the First Battle of Tarain, Muhammad of Ghur was roundly defeated, and suffered a severe wound as well. A graphic description of a key confrontation in the battle seems almost to leap out of a miniature painting of the period. Imagine the dust of the north Indian plains, the blinding, deafening clash of steel, the cries of soldiers, the Turks on their steeds, the Rajputs relying on elephants. And then,
the Sultan attacked the elephant on which the ruler of Delhi, Govind Rai, was riding…. He struck his lance at the face of the Rai with such force that two of his teeth fell into his mouth. The Rai threw a javelin at him and severely wounded his arm. The Sultan turned round his charger’s head and retreated. Due to the agony of the wound, he was unable to remain seated on horseback and was about to fall on the ground when a lion-hearted warrior, a Khalji stripling, recognized him, sprang up (on the horse) behind the Sultan and, supporting him in his arms, urged the horse with his voice and brought him out of the field of battle.
Back in the mountains of Ghur, Muhammad began preparations to avenge his defeat, not without punishing first the amirs who had somewhat ignominiously fled the battlefield of Tarain. So great was his grief at his humiliation, it is said, that he would refuse to eat or drink.
At about the time when Muhammad was licking his wounds in Ghur and preparing his comeback, a young mystic called Muinuddin, of a Sufi order founded in the nearby town of Chisht saw the Prophet of Islam in a dream and left for Ajmer in the kingdom of Rai Pithora, where he founded what would become the greatest Sufi movement in India. That Muinuddin Chishti, as the young shaikh was called, could carry out his activities in a kingdom that was at war with his compatriots and coreligionists is something to ponder over. To this day, long after the Turkish dynasties have passed into oblivion, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims of all faiths visit Ajmer on the anniversary of Muinuddin of Chisht’s death.
In 1192, at the Second Battle of Tarain, Rai Pithora was defeated by Muhammad. According to some sources the Rajput king was executed; according to others he was allowed to function at Ajmer as a vassal and later put to death for treason. Rai Pithora’s son was allowed to rule in Ajmer for a while. Govind Rai, the ruler of Delhi and hero of the first battle, was killed in the second one, but his successor ruled for some time, acknowledging the authority of Muhammad.
From here on, the fate of India took a sharp turn. A new culture, based on a new faith, grew, receiving royal patronage and sometimes guiding the rulers using precepts that were foreign to this already highly cultured land. Architecture, music, language, law, and politics were all affected. Mosque minarets and domes, the muezzin’s prayer call five times a day, the Arabic script, and the Persian language symbolized this new order. The Turks had distinctly Oriental features, with fair skin, dark hair, and high cheekbones. They brought with them different court and civil rituals, alien personal manners and prejudices. Their racist epithet for the dark Indian was “crow.” They imported army mercenaries and civilian immigrants. And the seed of resentment and division was sown on the subcontinent to last to the present day. The Partition of 1947 was not a resolution; it simply amplified the resentments. Its violence and ravages were in effect another war. Since then, three conventional wars have already been fought by India and Pakistan.
The Rajput king Prithviraj—Rai Pithora—is a figure of a romantic and ultimately tragic legend, a gallant and noble king, whose story has come down to us in an epic poem titled Prithvirajaraso, composed by his court poet and friend Chand Bardai but thoroughly embellished over the generations. His dashing courage is illustrated by a bravura public act: at a ceremony held in a neighbouring and rival Rajput kingdom, in which its princess, Sanyogita, would select her groom from a number of suitors, Prithviraj had suddenly emerged from behind a statue and rode away with the princess, who all the time had been his secret lover. Prithviraj had purposely not been invited to the ceremony. His defiance proved the downfall of the Rajputs, for whereas they had united in the First Battle of Tarain, in the second confrontation Prithviraj went without the previous level of support and was crushed.
According to a Rajput legend, Prithviraj was taken in chains by his conqueror all the way to Ghur. There, having dared to look Muhammad in the eye, he was blinded. But he had his beloved Chand Bardai at hand. Chand contrived a ruse to avenge Rajput humiliation. Presented before the sultan, he boasted that his lord, though blinded, was so skilled an archer that he could take aim and shoot his target merely from hearing a sound. An archery competition was called to test this claim, at which Chand caused the foolish, arrogant sultan to utter an inopportune word. Prithviraj turned, at once took aim, and slew the conqueror of Delhi.
In contrast, the Turkish Afghan sultans hardly cut romantic figures. They seem hard, hungry, and restless. According to some accounts, their horses were swifter and their fighting tactics faster against the cumbersome but lavishly decorated elephants of the Rajputs. They were on the offence, and on the chessboard that was the battlefield the knight had outdone the rook.
Not surprisingly, Chand Bardai, and those who interpolated the text of his tragic romance afterwards, portray Muhammad as a treacherous thug and torturer. The Muslim chroniclers, who wrote in Persian, were not writing nostalgic heroic paeans but historical narrative, but they, too, naturally had their biases, arising from the arrogance of the conqueror and the necessity to demonstrate Islamic piety and superiority, as well as abject loyalty to their benefactors the sultans. According to them, Muhammad of Ghur was assassinated on the evening of March 15, 1206, in his tent on the bank of the Indus river while returning from a military campaign. The identity of the assassins is a matter of debate. Among the suspects are the Ismailis, of Assassin notoriety, and Rajput loyalists. Within fourteen years of his death, his birthplace, Ghur, had been razed by the Mongols, its inhabitants massacred. The independent sultanates of Central Asia disappeared. Only Delhi remained to resist the Mongol onslaught, and it did so valiantly.
Muhammad of Ghur had left behind in Delhi his viceroy Qutbuddin Aibak, who in 1206 declared himself the independent sultan of Delhi. His capital was at the site of the old Rajput city, called Qila Rai Pithora, in the present-day suburb of South Delhi. The thick rubble-built walls of this old city are still visible in some places. In the new city, Aibak built the magnificent Quwwatul Islam mosque and began construction of the tower called Qutb Minar, both of which stand today at the Qutb complex among a dazzling array of red sandstone structures in various stages of ruin. The Qutb Minar was completed by later sultans and stands at 238 feet, with five storeys. The tower and the mosque symbolize the triumph of the new order and, more relevant for modern times, the beginning of a clash of cultures. An inscription on the mosque tells us it was built out of materials taken from twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples, the evidence of which is still visible in the rows of pillars in the mosque decorated with typically Indian floral motifs and animal and human figures, some of which have been disfigured so as not to offend the piety of the Muslim prayer house. A great screen wall with arched openings stands in front of the mosque. The arches of this early mosque are of the indigenous style (succeeding layers of brick projecting a distance outwards from the one below, to form an arched opening), found in many ancient cultures. The “true arch” of the Roman and Islamic world would come to predominate later. Each of the storeys of the Qutb Minar had a balcony, the balustrades of which are now missing. It was perhaps a tower of victory; its sides are embellished by Quranic texts, and it has been claimed that it might also have been used by the muezzin to call the faithful to prayer.
Not surprisingly, taking into account the bitter humiliation, not to say hatred, that some still draw from the result of the eight-hundred-year-old Second Battle of Tarain, the Qutb Minar has been the subject of some controversy. A tradition claims that the tower was originally built by Prithviraj for his beloved wife Sanyogita to catch a glimpse of the Jumna river every morning, but this has been dismissed by archaeologists. In 1957, a 213-foot brick tower, the Minare Jam was discovered in the Ghur region in Afghanistan and is believed to be a direct inspiration for the Qutb Minar. Recently and more significantly, Hindu militants have claimed the site as Hindu, on the basis that temple materials were used there; an attempted worship was aborted by authorities. The tower has also been struck by lightning and been restored and repaired over the centuries.
A certain Major Smith has earned a reputation for his indiscriminate interference with the Indian monuments. Among his dubious achievements is the removal of the balustrades from the Qutb and building a superstructure upon it in 1803 that was so hideous that in 1848 the governor general, Lord Hardinge, had it removed.
Eight centuries later, oblivious to all this history and controversy, visitors come in great numbers to stroll inside the grounds that house the pink and white structures, for this is a popular site, spacious, beautiful, and mysterious, away from the buzz of the main city. Vendors ply limp postcards and packaged snacks, a snake charmer plays to a lethargic snake.
