June 2007
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After 20 years in the Indian capital, William Dalrymple remembers the city he fell in love with as a visiting teenager
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, there was one thing that astounded all visitors to Delhi: the ruins. For miles in every direction, half-collapsed and overgrown, robbed and reoccupied, neglected by all, lay the remains of 600 years of trans-Indian Imperium. Hammams and palaces, thousand-pillared halls and mighty tomb towers, empty temples and semi-deserted Sufi shrines: there seemed to be no end to the litter of ages. "The prospect towards Delhi, as far as the eye can reach, is covered with the crumbling remains of gardens, pavilions, and burying places," wrote William Franklin in 1795. "The environs of this once-magnificent city appear now a shapeless heap of ruins..."
This century, however, the population of Delhi has grown from about 200,000 to more than 15 million. Many of the ruins seen by past visitors have disappeared. Those that remain stand not in open countryside, but atop roundabouts, or tucked in beside the high rises and flyovers of South Delhi. They obscure the fairways of the golf course and provide a destination for the joggers in the Lodhi Gardens.
I have lived in Delhi now on and off for nearly 20 years, and it remains my favourite city. But I first fell in love with it when I arrived, aged 18, on the foggy winter's night of 26 January 1984. I knew nothing at all about India.
My childhood had been spent in rural Scotland, on the shores of the Firth of Forth, near Edinburgh, and of my contemporaries at school I was probably the least well travelled. At the age of 11 I begged my mother to take me abroad, as I was the only boy in my class who hadn't had a glimpse of life overseas. So she took me to Paris for the weekend.
Perhaps for this reason, Delhi - and India - had a more striking effect on me than it would have had on more cosmopolitan teenagers. The city hooked me. I backpacked for a few months, and hung out in Goa; but I quickly found my way back to Delhi and got myself a job at Mother Teresa's home in the north of the city.
The nuns gave me a room overlooking a rubbish dump. In the morning I would look out to see the sad regiment of rag-pickers trawling the stinking piles of refuse; overhead vultures circling the thermals, forming patterns like fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope. In the afternoons, after I had swept the compound and the inmates were safely asleep, I used to slip out and explore. I would take a rickshaw into the Old City and pass through the narrowing funnel of gullies and lanes, alleys and cul-de-sacs, feeling the houses close in around me.
In summer I preferred the less claustrophobic avenues of the Civil Lines or Lutyens' Delhi. Then, under a pulsing sun, I would stroll along shady rows of neem, tamarind and arjuna, passing white classical bungalows with their bow fronts and bushes of molten gulmohar.
In both Delhis, new and old, it was the ruins that fascinated me. However hard the planners tried to create new colonies of gleaming concrete, the crumbling tomb towers, old mosques or ancient Islamic colleges would intrude, appearing suddenly on roundabouts or in municipal gardens, curving the road network and obscuring the fairways of the golf course.
New Delhi was not new at all. Its broad avenues encompassed a groaning necropolis, a graveyard of dynasties. Some said there were seven dead cities of Delhi, and that the current one was the eighth; others counted 15 or even 21. All agreed that the crumbling ruins of these towns were without number.
It was the Red Fort of the Great Mughals that kept drawing me back. Gradually, I became interested in the Mughals who had once lived there, and began to read about them. It was here that I first thought of writing a Mughal Quartet, a four-volume history that I am now working on and which may take decades to complete. The first book of the series to appear has been, illogically, the final one - The Last Mughal - about Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last of the Mughal emperors, a mystic, poet and calligrapher whom the British exiled to Rangoon in 1858 after they put down the Indian Mutiny.
Sometimes, on winter afternoon walks, I wander to the lovely delicate remains of Zafar's fabulous summer palace in Mehrauli, a short distance from my Delhi farmhouse, and I wonder what Zafar would have made of all this. Looking out over the Sufi shrine that abuts his palace, I suspect he would somehow have made his peace with the fast-changing cyber-India of call centres, software parks and back-office processing units.
After all, realism and acceptance were Zafar's qualities. For all the tragedy of his life, he was able to see that the world continued to turn, and that however much the dogs might bark, the great caravan of life continued moving on. As he wrote in a poem shortly after his imprisonment, as Mughal Delhi lay wrecked around him: "Delhi was once a paradise, /Where Love held sway and reigned; /But its charm lies ravished now /And only ruins remain."
British Airways flies to Delhi from London Heathrow. The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury, £8.99) is out now
