"If you can be in India only so short a time as seven weeks," said an
artist friend of mine--and among his pictures is a sombre representation
of the big sacred bull that grazes under the walls of Delhi Fort--"why
not stay in Delhi all the while? You will then learn far more of India
than by rushing about." I think he was right, although it was not
feasible to accept the advice. For Delhi has so much; it has, first and
foremost, the Fort; it has the Jama Masjid, that immense mosque where
on Fridays at one o'clock may be seen Mohammedans of every age wearing
every hue, thousands worshipping as one; it has the ancient capitals
scattered about the country around it; it has signs and memories of
the Mutiny; it has delectable English residences; and it has the Chadni
Chauk, the long main street with all its curious buildings and
crowds and countless tributary alleys, every one of which is the East
crystallised, every one of which has its white walls, its decorative
doorways, its loiterers, its beggars, its artificers, and its defiance
of the bogey, Progress.
Another thing: in January, Delhi, before the sun is high and after he
has sunk, is cool and bracing.
But, most of all, Delhi is interesting because it was the very centre
of the Mogul dominance, and when one has become immersed in the story
of the great rulers, from Babar to Aurungzebe, one thinks of most other
history as insipid. Of Babar, who reigned from 1526 to 1530, I saw no
trace in India; but his son Humayun (1530-1556) built Indrapat, which is
just outside the walls of Delhi, and he lies close by in the beautiful
mausoleum that bears his name. Humayun's son, Akbar (1556-1605),
preferred Agra to Delhi; nor was Jahangir (1605-1627), who succeeded
Akbar, a great builder hereabout; but with Shah Jahan (1627-1658),
Jahangir's son, came the present Delhi's golden age. He it was who built
the Jama Masjid, the great mosque set commandingly on a mound and gained
by magnificent flights of steps. To the traveller approaching the city
from any direction the two graceful minarets of the mosque stand for
Delhi. It was Shah Jahan, price of Mogul builders, who decreed also the
palace in the Fort, to say nothing (at the moment) of the Taj Mahal at
Agra; while two of his daughters, Jahanara, and Roshanara, that naughty
Begam, enriched Delhi too, the little pavilion in the Gardens that
bear Roshanara's name being a gem. Wandering among these architectural
delights, now empty and under alien protection, it is difficult to
believe that their period was as recent as Cromwell and Milton. But in
India the sense of chronology vanishes.
After Shah Jahan came his crafty son, Aurungzebe, who succeeded in
keeping his empire together until 1707, and with him the grandeur of the
Grand Moguls waned and after him ceased to be, although not until the
Mutiny was their rule extinguished. As I have just said, in India the
sense of chronology vanishes, or goes astray, and it is with a start
that one is confronted, in the Museum in Delhi Fort, by a photograph of
the last Mogul!
In Bombay, during my wakeful moments in the hottest part of the day,
I had passed the time and imbibed instruction by reading the three
delightful books of the late E. H. Aitken, who called himself
"Eha"--"Behind the Bungalow," "The Tribes on My Frontier" and "A
Naturalist on the Prowl." No more amusing and kindly studies of the
fauna, flora and human inhabitants of a country can have ever been
written than these; and I can suggest, to the domestically curious mind,
no better preparation for a visit to India. But at Raisina, when the
cool evenings set in and it was pleasant to get near the wood fire, I
took to history and revelled in the story of the Moguls as told by many
authorities, but most entertainingly perhaps by Tavernier, the French
adventurer who took service under Aurungzebe. If any one wants to know
what Delhi was like in the seventeenth century during Aurungzebe's long
reign, and how the daily life in the Palace went, and would learn
more of the power and autocracy and splendour and cruelty of the Grand
Moguls, let him get Tavernier's record. If once I began to quote from it
I should never stop; and therefore I pass on, merely remarking that
when you have finished the travels of M. Tavernier, the travels of M.
Bernier, another contemporary French observer, await you. And I hold you
to be envied.
The Palace in the Fort is now but a fraction of what it was in the
time of Aurungzebe and his father, but enough remains to enable the
imaginative mind to reconstruct the past, especially if one has read
my two annalists. One of Bernier's most vivid passages describes the
Diwan-i-Am, or Hall of Public Audience, the building to which, after
leaving the modern military part of the Fort, one first comes, where the
Moguls sat in state during a durbar, and painted and gilded elephants,
richly draped, took part in the obeisances. Next comes the Hall of
Private Audiences, where the Peacock Throne once stood. It has now
vanished, but in its day it was one of the wonders of the world, the
tails of the two guardian peacocks being composed of precious stones and
the throne itself being of jewelled gold. It was for this that one of
Shah Jahan's poets wrote an inscription in which we find such lines as--
By the order of the Emperor the azure of Heaven
was exhausted on its decoration....
The world had become so short of gold on account of
its use in the throne that the purse of the Earth
was empty of treasure....
On a dark night, by the lustre of its rubies and pearls
it can lend stars to a hundred skies....
That was right enough, no doubt, but when our poet went on to say,
As long as a trace remains of existence and space
Shah Jahan shall continue to sit on this throne,
we feel that he was unwise. Such pronouncements can be tested. As it
happened, Shah Jahan was destined, very shortly after the poem was
written, to be removed into captivity by his son, and the rest of his
unhappy life was spent in a prison at Agra. On each end wall of the Hall
of Private Audience is the famous couplet,--
If there is a Paradise on the face of the earth,
It is this, Oh! it is this, Oh! it is this.
I think of the garden and palace of Delhi Fort as the loveliest spot
in India. Not the most beautiful, not the most impressive; but the
loveliest. The Taj Mahal has a greater beauty; the ruined city of
Fatehpur-Sikri has a greater dignity; but for the perfection of domestic
regality in design and material and workmanship, this marble home and
mosque and accompanying garden and terrace could not be excelled.
After the Halls of Audience we come to the seraglio and accompanying
buildings, where everything is perfect and nothing is on the grand
scale. The Pearl Mosque could hardly be smaller; and it is as pure and
fresh as a lotus. There is a series of apartments all in white marble
(with inlayings of gold and the most delicately pierced marble gratings)
through which a stream of water used to run (and it ran again at the
Coronation Durbar in 1911, when the Royal Baths were again made to
"function") that must be one of the most magical of the works of man.
Every inch is charming and distinguished. All these rooms are built
along the high wall which in the time of Shah Jahan and his many lady
loves was washed by the Jumna. But to-day the river has receded and a
broad strip of grass intervenes.