Delhi, for being one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, has been poorly served by its memory keepers. Post Independence, as the country became increasingly polarised, Urdu came to be associated, fallaciously, solely with Muslim culture. An insidious undermining of Urdu meant that in a short while, much of the urban elite of Delhi was disenfranchised from the language of its city. The literature and poetry lay scattered, un-translated and therefore unclaimed, by a generation of Indians that could no longer read Urdu. Two new books seek to rectify this injustice.
In City of My Heart, writer and historian Rana Safvi has translated into English four memoirs written in Urdu by noblemen who had a direct experience of life under the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. They bring to life an extraordinary world about to be effaced forever as the shadow of 1857 looms on the horizon. It is a genteel, syncretic world where life follows the pattern of the seasons but one, also, whose scope and ambition had been reduced to the walls of the Qila-e-Mubaarak, today called the Red Fort.
These accounts of the last days of Bahadur Shah in Delhi are in stark contrast to the audacious lives of the earlier Emperors. Where Akbar, for example, would jump onto ‘mast’ elephants, and fight tigers on foot, Bahadaur Shah instead is taken for hunts in a sedate, glass-covered palanquin. The Emperor does not dismount from the palanquin but shoots the animals and birds which are rounded up and brought by the shikari onto his path. Startling, also, is the Emperor’s surprisingly philosophical attitude towards his precipitous fall: ‘This country is God’s’, he says ‘and He can bestow it on whomever He pleases’.
It is these insights into a time long gone that are invaluable to a reader today. By translating these volumes into English Safvi has given a rare and fragile, gift to her readers—their past.
In Beloved Delhi: A Mughal City and her Greatest Poets, Saif Mahmood has chosen eight great classical Urdu poets of the 18th and 19th century Delhi and has used their poetry and their lives not only to mirror the tumult and upheavals in the city of Delhi itself but also to create sympathetic portraits of each poet. We learn, for example, of Mir Taqi Mir’s appalling abuse by his family who lock up, starve and bleed the young poet almost to death to ‘shock’ him out of an ill-advised love affair. This results in a fracture in his fragile mental state and life-long bouts of lunacy but also in luminous lines such as these:
Where has my delirium taken me?
I’ve been waiting for myself for so long.
Ghalib falls in love with the city of Benaras and callsb it, outrageously, ‘the Kaaba of Hindustan’ and is amused to learn of a drink called ‘gin’ because ‘it did bring about a jinn-like influence on the drinker!’
Indeed as Delhi convulses through 200 years of history, the Mughal star inexorably fading as marauders plunder her ancient and sacred treasures, these poets write incandescent lines, challenging every desecration and mourning each dying tradition. For example, Mirza Mohammad Rafi ‘Sauda’ ‘tells the mullah that religion is a menace’ and ‘Daagh’ on his last visit to his beloved Delhi says: ‘Come, meet me once, for this time will not return.’
The author, Dr Saif Mahmood, an advocate and an Urdu aficionado, writes in a lucid and lively prose. A fierce passion for the poetry of Urdu and the city of Delhi thrums through the book, deftly drawing the reader into the world of these poets and the grief at the loss of a great culture is tangible. There is a realisation, also, while comparing the juxtaposed Urdu and English poetry, that Urdu, with its complexity and nuance, was a far more evocative language of love and longing and the loss, with its disappearance, is ours.