In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, 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 six hundred 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 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...” “It has a feeling about it of ‘Is this not the
great Babylon?’ all ruins and desolation,” agreed Emily Eden.
This century, however, Delhi’s population has grown to more than fifteen
million. Already, many of those ruins have been lost. Those that remain
stand not in open countryside, but atop roundabouts, and 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. Above all it is the city’s relationship with its past that
fascinates me: of the great cities of the world, only Rome and Cairo can
even begin to rival Delhi for the sheer volume and density of historic
remains. New Delhi is not new at all; instead it is a groaning necropolis,
with enough ruins to keep any historian busy through several incarnations.
I returned to this amazing city with my family to live full time in January
2004. Since then I have been researching a book, The Last Mughal, about
Bahadur Shah Zafar, the final Mughal emperor, who the British exiled to
Rangoon in 1858 after viciously putting down the Indian Mutiny. In the
course of my research I came across Sir Thomas Metcalfe. His is a
fascinating story, and investigating how he, his brother and son set
themselves up in Delhi in the early nineteenth century has led me to explore
many areas of the city I might otherwise never have discovered.
The first of the Metcalfes to come to Delhi was Charles, elder brother of Sir
Thomas. He arrived in the Mughal capital in 1806, as assistant to the
British ambassador, Sir David Ochterlony, a Scottish eccentric who was said
to take all thirteen of his Indian wives on a daily promenade around the
walls of the Red Fort, each on her own elephant. Charles Metcalfe had fitted
in with the tone set by his boss, building a house in the Shalimar Gardens
to the north of the old city, and fathering three sons by the Sikh bibi he
had met in Lahore.
I went up to Shalimar to see what was left. Although this was where Emperor
Aurangzeb had once chosen to be crowned, it was now overgrown and forgotten,
with a few ruined Mughal pavilions and dry water channels embraced within
fine surrounding walls. Buffaloes were being milked in the village to our
side, jets of frothy milk filling a battered tin pail. On the other side an
elderly mullah was sitting on a carpet nodding his turban as he instructed
young novices on the Koran and the Hadiths, the chanting of voices carrying
above the distant thunder of the Grand Trunk Road. Lilies and irises were in
full bloom — vivid swathes of azure leading to a vine-covered pavilion,
which Metcalfe had converted into a weekend bungalow: the perfect escape
from diplomatic stress.
His younger brother Thomas had a subtly different attitude to India. Times
were changing, and when the younger Metcalfe arrived in Delhi in 1812,
British power and arrogance were growing. Sir Thomas was not the sort of man
who would have dreamt of dressing, as some ambassadorial predecessors had,
in full Mughal pagri and jama. Still less would he have dreamt of imitating
Sir David Ochterlony’s harem. Instead he lived alone, and arranged that his
London tailors, Pulford of St James’s, should regularly send out to Delhi a
chest of sober but fashionable English clothes.
His one concession to Indian taste was to smoke a silver hookah — every day,
after breakfast, for exactly thirty minutes. If one of his servants failed
to perform his appointed hookah duty, Metcalfe would call for a pair of
white kid gloves, which he would take from their silver salver and slowly
pull over his delicate white fingers. Then, “with solemn dignity”, having
lectured the servant, he “proceeded to pinch gently but firmly the ear of
the culprit, and then let him go — a reprimand that was entirely
efficacious”.
Thomas built not one but two houses in Delhi. Metcalfe House, also known as
Jahan Numa, or World Showing, was his palatial palladian bungalow on the
banks of the Yamuna to the north of the city — an indirect challenge to the
Mughal’s Red Fort a little downstream. If the Red Fort had its marble domes
and scented night gardens with floating pavilions, then Metcalfe House had
its flowerbeds with English blooms, its marble columns and swimming pool,
cypress avenues and orange groves, a library of 25,000 books, fine oil
paintings and rosewood Georgian furniture. Today, the virtually intact house
belongs to the army and its magnificent Georgian facade can only be viewed
from beyond the gates.
To the south of the city, however, Thomas built a second country house,
Dilkusha, or Delighter of the Heart, and it’s still a great pleasure to
visit: indeed it is my family’s favourite Delhi picnic spot. Metcalfe built
it in a converted octagonal Mughal tomb near Mehrauli, replacing the
original sarcophagus with a billiard table. It became his answer to the
nearby Mughal summer palace of Zafar Mahal, and he developed a Mughal garden
to emphasise the parallel. Both his houses sat within extensive estates and
were entered — then as now — through colossal Georgian gateways; and both
were decorated with follies. Dilkusha had a lighthouse, small fort, pigeon
house, boating pond and ornamental ziggurat.
Today, the ruins of the tomb lie in a newly built archeological park just
opened by the Indian National Trust south of the Qu’tb Minar. The tomb
stands, its dome and arches intact, with its strange colonial additions —
the billiard room, a porte-cochere, the guest wing and kitchen block. Yet
for all the oddity of his life in a Mughal tomb, it seems this was one place
where Thomas was really happy. “The ruins of grandeur that extend for miles
on every side fill it with serious reflection,” he wrote. “The palaces
crumbling into dust... the myriads of vast mausoleums, every one of which
was intended to convey to futurity the deathless fame of its cold
inhabitant, and all of which are now passed by, unknown and unnoticed. These
things cannot be looked at with indifference.”
He commissioned a series of images of Delhi’s monuments, ruins, palaces and
shrines from local artist Mazar Ali Khan. The images were later bound into
an album, accompanied by his long text, which he sent to his daughter Emily
as she headed from an English schooling to join him in Delhi.
“The Delhi Book” was recently bought by the British Library where it can be
seen in the Ritblat display galleries, with its wonderful images of Mughal
mosques and ruins, processions of caparisoned elephants and horses, purdah
carriages and courtly cavalry. But for all the life and colour in the
paintings of The Delhi Book, there is a sadness inherent in its images; for
it records a city on the eve of catastrophe.
On a May morning in 1857, only thirteen years after the album’ s completion,
three hundred mutinous sepoys rode into Delhi and massacred every British
man, woman and child they could find, declaring Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar
their emperor. No friend of the British, Zafar was powerless to resist being
made the leader of an uprising he knew from the start was doomed. Within a
month Delhi was surrounded by the British, the start of one of the most
pitiless sieges in Indian history.
The Siege of Delhi was the Raj’s Stalingrad: a fight to the death between two
powers, neither of whom could retreat. For the four hottest months of the
Indian summer, the beautiful Mughal capital was bombarded by British
artillery. There were unimaginable casualties, with Indians and British
starving, the city without water, and combatants on both sides driven to the
limits of physical and mental endurance. Finally, on September 14, 1857, the
British attacked and took the city, massacring and looting as they went.
Delhi was left an empty ruin.
One of the cruellest of the British on recapturing the city was Theophilus
Metcalfe — the son of Sir Thomas, and the city magistrate during the
outbreak. Known as “One-eyed Metcalfe”, due to his monocle, he had to be
removed from Delhi following the recapture as even by the barbaric standards
of the time his behaviour was inexcusably bloodthirsty. According to
Commissioner Charles Saunders, “Metcalfe was so maddened with revenge
against the Mahometans, that... the sooner the direct power of life and
death is taken from him the better.”
In the weeks that followed, the vengeful British oversaw the wholesale ruin of
great areas of Mughal Delhi. The Red Fort was plundered and much of it —
including the exquisite harem courts — razed to the ground. Though the royal
family had surrendered peacefully, all ten of the emperor’ s surviving sons
were shot in cold blood and he was sentenced to transportation. Separated
from everyone and everything he loved, brokenhearted, the last of the Great
Mughals died in exile in Rangoon on Friday November 7, 1862, aged 87. As
Zafar wrote, just before his death: “Delhi was once a paradise, Where Love
held sway and reigned; But its charm lies ravished now And only ruins
remain.”
Yet today these very ruins are a principal part of Delhi’s charm, and a winter
picnic among them one of the great pleasures of any visit.
William Dalrymple’s latest book is The Last Mughal: The Fall of a
Dynasty, Delhi 1857 (Bloomsbury £25). To buy it for £23, inc p&p
in the UK, call The Sunday Times Books First (0870 165 8585).
His last book, White Mughals, won the Wolfson Prize for History
Getting there: British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com),
Virgin Atlantic (0870 380 2007, www.virgin-atlantic.com
) and Jet Airways (0800 026 5626, www.jetairways.com)
fly to Delhi from Heathrow, and Air India (020 8560 9996, www.airindia.com)
flies from Heathrow and Birmingham. Expect winter fares to start from £330.
Where to stay: built in 1931, the historic Imperial Hotel (00
91 11- 2334 1234, www.theimperialindia.com)
has large doubles from £155. Another good colonial-era option is Claridges
(4133 5133, www.claridges.com), with
doubles from £115. For a contemporary feel, the Manor (2692 5151, www.themanordelhi.com)
has designer-style doubles from £94.
Tour operators: Colours of India (020 8343 3446, www.colours-of-india.co.uk)
has five nights, B&B, at the Imperial in Delhi from £1,458pp, including
flights with Jet Airways from Heathrow and transfers. Alternatively, a
seven-night Golden Triangle tour, visiting Delhi, Agra and Jaipur, is from
£1,966pp. Or try Trans Indus (020 8566 2729, www.transindus.co.uk),
Southall Travel (0870 010 9003, www.southalltravel.co.uk)
or Pettitts (01892 515966, www.pettitts.co.uk)
