Hello, hello!
Last Sunday I went on a guided walk across the ruins of a 13th century royal complex.
Even though I have lived in Delhi for so long, I had never seen this part of its history and geography before. The city has never encouraged in me any illusion that I now know it well. Whether it’s 32nd Avenue in Gurgaon with its glitzy cafes and restaurants, or the designer boutiques in Shahpur Jat or Hauz Khas or the newly paved Daryaganj book market, the city has always felt as unfamiliar as it is immediate.
The royal complex, fascinating as it promised to be, paled in comparison to the eccentricities of the mad genius that built it. Mohammad bin Tughluq ruled Delhi for 26 years (1325 – 1351). He was a polyglot who spoke Persian and Sanskrit, Arabic and Turkic. Some historians say he was the only Sultan who participated in Hindu festivities and even withdrew the jizya tax on infidels.
So much for the genius part. The mad part is owed to his penchant for capital punishment.
Our walk leader told us that as per visitor accounts blood stained the floors of his court every day. Perhaps it was because he suffered revolts in every single year of his reign. Perhaps those were just different times. Perhaps he had Paranoid Personality Disorder.
The man was as inventive as he was imperious. For instance, he ordered his subjects to move down south in the peak of summer. Then seven years later, he changed his mind, and ordered them to move back to Delhi again. Such fun!
He also issued token currency inspired by the Chinese without having an official mint. It led to folk making their own money. A financial crisis ensued.
Scholars still debate the merits of his ideas. Today, we live in a time of iterations and scaling, of A/B testing, and consensus building (to whatever extent and by whatever means). Perhaps Tughluq would have fared better if he had access to these models. Or to risperidone.
A psychiatrist on the walk urged us to not attempt to pigeonhole him by conducting post-mortem psychoanalyses. But I feel that attributing his despotism to crippling anxiety helps me see him as somewhat human.
The walk itself was interesting too. We waded through sugarcane grass overgrown during the recent monsoons, with yours truly worried about snakes, having seen a mongoose at the very start of the walk.
Our group was about twenty people. But, before we started, we were joined by a bare-chested and barefoot boy with a gorgeous head of hair. He tagged along, staying silent for the most part, watching the walk leader speak words from languages and contexts he could barely understand, then scanning the other faces to see if they did.
On the way, he picked a discarded bandana from the grass and then scratched himself to distraction until he was asked to throw it away. A young woman was worried by the black ants. So he kept an eye on her ankles for the next hour and warned her every time he saw them come close. As we stood under a caved in roof propped up by pillars, he grew bored, and started to kick a used syringe lying there, with bare feet. The psychiatrist told him to stop. At this point he found the vial. But no one seemed to pay any attention.
We moved on. At one point, I turned around and saw he had disappeared from the group as suddenly as he had appeared.
And at the end of the two and a half hours my thighs were very extremely sore. I had climbed the narrow high steps all the way to the roof of the ruined Bijai Mandal (victory pavilion) from where I could see as far as the Qutub Minar ( the tallest brick minaret in the entire world).
It was odd walking this former royal building, now unticketed and unguarded; through wild grass pressed upon by the breeze; a mongoose watching us from a distance; mynas and crows feasting on bread crumbs left for absent dogs. At my feet plastic sachets of fiery momo chutney, paper plates, and empty crisp packets wafted about. The Sultan’s name, if it had ever been there, seemed long lost from the surface of the Delhi quartzite walls. Now there was GOURAV in white chalk and graffiti in black paint. Modern flats, which abutted the fenced boundaries of the fort, had tossed their poly-bagged trash into the complex.
I felt unease as I walked – a sense of vertigo from the ground constantly spinning under my feet. What I had stumbled on to was not so much a place but an event – time.
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Watching
Cornell University hosts the BirdCast Migration Dashboard. It provides summaries of nocturnal bird migration patterns, including estimates of the total number of birds migrating, their directions, speeds, and altitudes (from the website).
If I look up New York for instance, it tells me 1,900 birds have flown across the New York County sky tonight. They’re heading South East and include Warblers, Thrushes, and Grosbeaks. They’re flying at an altitude of 10,000 feet with their personal GPS that doesn’t depend on rivers running dry.
Isn’t that absolutely incredible? I wish there was a dashboard for my part of the world too to welcome the visitors. And I wonder what their calendars might look like.
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Reading
I’d recommend The Travels of Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan who decided to travel 73,000 miles across Asia & Africa. He was abroad for 30 years. When he finally returned home, his parents were dead, his hometown was unrecognizable, and he had become a stranger in his own land.
In 1333, he reached India. And guess who he met? The wealthiest man in the Muslim world – Mohd Bin Tughlug. Although he gained employment as a judge, he nearly lost his life several times as well. Eventually, he sailed from Calicut - the same port where, two centuries later, the Portuguese arrived.
I wonder what kept the ground steady under his feet.
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Eating
Speaking of calendars, a large part of India is now in the run of festivals which began with the birthday of Krishna.
Currently, it is Ganesh Paksha, celebrated during the bright fortnight of the lunar month.
Ganesh is offered modaks – sweet dumplings with rice or refined flour shells shaped like teardrops and pleated on the outside. They are filled with grated coconut and jaggery.
Just like the festival, which was first celebrated in 1893, the modak keeps getting reinvented. New versions include chocolate. In fact, I recently saw a recipe for tiramisu modak on Instagram that was inspiring some derision in the comments.
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Thinking
While in the central courtyard of the Begumpuri mosque, one of the participants said that there were no such things as Islamic arches. He argued they were ideas borrowed from Babylon.
I knew nothing on the subject so, "That sounds interesting," was my quiet reply.
But a quick Googling later revealed this was not true. Sure, architecture as a discipline is as susceptible to influence as any other. But, Multifoil and Ogee arches were Islamic inventions. So there is, in fact, such a thing as an Islamic arch.
Numbers, however, are a different story. As any Indian on the internet would love to tell you - they are not Arabic. The decimal system originated in India in the 6th century CE. It was adopted & translated by Arabs who took it to the Europeans. Like with Prada's Kolhapuri sandals, little credit was given where it was due.
The more things change, the more they stay the same?
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It was a Sunday and I was supposed to relax. But it ended with a soreness in my quadriceps and a ringing inside my head.
The world (by way of a date, an arch, a system of numbers, a child) felt like it was dissolving under the weight of endless, competing layers of trivia and truths.
Best,
Skendha
The Long View Letters
P.S. Would you like me to include more photos and/or links in my newsletters? Please let me know. Your questions, corrections, comments are also always welcome.
