If you were transported to Delhi 100 years back, what would you do to preserve the architectural wonders of the city?

One hundred years ago, much was already lost. It was 150 years ago, in the aftermath of 1857 that Delhi really need a conservationist to stop the British from blowing up many of the finest buildings of Mughal Delhi. When the British captured the Red Fort in 1857, they pulled down the gorgeous harem appartments, and in their place erected a line of barracks that looked as if they have been modelled on Wormwood Scrubs. Even at the time, the destruction was regarded as an act of wanton philistinism.

The great Victorian architectural historian James Fergusson was certainly no whining liberal, but recorded his horror at what had happened in his History of Indian Architcture: “Those who carried out this fearful piece of vandalism,” he wrote, did not even think “to make a plan of what they were destroying, or preserving any record of the most splendid palace in the world… The engineers perceived that by gutting the palace they could provide at no expense a wall round their barrack yard, and one that no drunken soldier could scale without detection, and for this or some other wretched motive of economy the palace was sacrificed.” He added: “The only modern act to be compared with this is the destruction of the summer palace in Pekin. That however was an act of red-handed war. This was a deliberate act of unnecessary Vandalism.”

Who is the most charismatic Mughal according to you and why?

It has to be Akbar. Like Ashoka, he was a great war leader, who tired of killing and devoted himself to uniting his subjects and promoting peaceful philosophies.

Is there any other city in the world that catches your imagination like Delhi?

I love Istanbul too. Also Lahore and Cochin. In Europe I love Paris and Rome - and for very different reasons, New York.

Why do you think Christianity and Islam have had a history of conflict, a conflict that continues and finds dangerous repercussions in today’s (political) world? Where do you think this conflict is heading in future?

I don’t think Christianity and Islam have a history conflict. In fact much of my work has been a rebuke to those who like to see the relationship between the Christian and Islamic world exclusively and simplistically in terms of jihads and crusades, clashes, violence and destruction. There were certainly many belligerent interludes; but it was clearly a more complex and multifaceted relationship than this, with contact propelled partly by pragmatism and partly by mutual interest; by the fascinated admiration of scholars and the plagiarism of craftsmen; and by friendship and rivalry, as well as by diplomatic manoeuvring and war.

What is your notion of a secular nation? How do you view India’s past and present in this perspective?

I think the key is to keep religion out of politics. India is a deeply religious nation in many ways, but by and large manages to keep politics out of religion. The BJP and RSS will, hopefully, come to be seen as exceptional moments in India’s history. Thankfully the country seems to have rejected their vision of India as a Hindu version of Pakistan.

Historians are visionaries in their own way. Do you agree? Why?

Historians come in all shapes and sizes, but these days few are visionaries sadly. The specialization of academic history means that most of the history is micro-history, and there are few brave enough to do a Ramchandra Guha and survey an entire nation over half a century.

Children and teenagers often dislike history as a subject. How do you think we can instill a love for the subject amongst the youth?

India seems to be unique in this respect - the teachers seem to have found a way of killing the interest in the subject. Elsewhere – Britain for example- history is the new rock and roll: it dominates the bestseller lists and fills the peak time TV schedules.

What are the travel books by other authors that you enjoy reading?

My favourites are Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia.

If you had to read out from some book to children, what book would it be and why?

I am reading to my kids Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals at the moment and they love it.

And finally, can you tell us about any interesting fact on The Mughals that is yet unrevealed in your books?

In the research for my new book, The Last Mughal, my colleague Mahmoud Farooqi and I have used the 20,000 rebel documents in Urdu and Persian which survive from the different sepoy camps and the palace in Delhi, as well as the police stations, and the court of justice, all of which we found in the National Archives. They were well catalogued in 1921 so it was quite a surprise that as many as 75% of the papers we called up had never been requisitioned before.

Discovering the sheer scale of the treasures held by the National Archives was one of the highlights of the whole project for me. It is commonplace that they lament the absence of Indian sources on 1857 and the corresponding need to rely on the huge quantities of easily accessible British material - memoirs, travelogues, letters, histories -which carry with them not only the British version of events but also British attitudes and preconceptions about the whole rising; in that sense little has changed since Vincent Smith complained in 1923 “that the story has been chronicled from one side only”.

Yet all this time in the National Archives there existed as detailed a documentation of the four months of the uprising in Delhi as can exist for any Indian city at any period of history - great unwieldy mountains of chits, pleas, orders, petitions, complaints, receipts, rolls of attendance and lists of casualties, predictions of victory and promises of loyalty, notes from spies of dubious reliability and letters from eloping lovers - all neatly bound in string and boxed up in the cool, hushed air-conditioned vaults of the Indian National Archives.

What was even more exciting was the street-level nature of much of the material. Although the documents were collected by the victorious British from the palace and the army camp, they contained huge quantities of petitions and requests from the ordinary citizens of Delhi - potters and courtesans, sweetmeat makers and overworked water carriers- exactly the sort of people who usually escape the historian’s net. The Mutiny Papers overflow with glimpses of real life: the bird catchers and lime makers who have had their charpoys stolen by sepoys; the horse trader from Haryana looted by Gujjars on the outskirts of Delhi as he walks home from selling his wares, his pocket full of cash; the gamblers playing cards in a recently ruined house and ogling the women next door, to the great alarm of the family living there; the sweetmeat makers who refuse to take their sweets up to the trenches in Qudsia Bagh until they are paid for the last load.

As a source for daily events, for the motivation of the rebels, for the problems they faced, the levels of chaos in the city, and the ambiguous and equivocal response of both the Mughal elite and the Hindu trading class of the city, the Mutiny Papers contain an unrivalled quantity of unique material. Cumulatively the stories that the collection contains allows the uprising to be seen not in terms of nationalism, imperialism, orientalism or other such abstractions, but instead as a human event of extraordinary, tragic and often capricious outcomes, and allow us to resurrect the ordinary individuals whose fate it was to be accidentally caught up in one of the great upheavals of history.

It is rather remarkable that all these papers in the National Archives have never been properly explored before: I feel rather like an Indian historian would feel if he were to go to Paris and find almost unused the complete records of the French Revolution sitting in the Bibliotheque Nationale. I think the difficulty of the Urdu shikastah script, and the strange late Mughal scribal conventions must have deterred many researchers. And for cracking that I have to thank the skill and persistence of Mahmoud. But there has as a whole been a strange unwillingness on the part of many historians to recognize the degree to which Delhi was the centre of events - it was, after all, the destination of 100,000 out of the 139,000 rebel sepoys. Among right wing Indian historians such VD Savarkar this may have been partly due to disquiet at the idea of largely Hindu sepoys going to Delhi and asking a Muslim ruler to lead them. In right wing Hindu mythology the Mughals were brutal oppressors, so one can see why some researchers preferred to concentrate on Mangal Pandey in Barrackpore or the Rani of Jhansi - two straightforwardly nationalist heroes.

William Dalrymple was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of Firth of Forth. He is the author of five books of history and travel, including the highly acclaimed bestseller City of Djinns, which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. His previous book, White Mughals, garnered a range of prizes, including the prestigious Wolfson Prize for history 2003 and the Scottish Book of the Year Prize. It was also shortlisted for the PEN History Award, the Kiriyama Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. A stage version by Christopher Hampton has been co-commissioned by the National Theatre and the Tamasha Theatre Company.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Asiatic Society, Dalrymple was awarded the 2002 Mungo Park Medal by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for his ‘outstanding contribution to travel literature’ and the Sykes Medal of the Royal Society of Asian Affairs in 2005 for his contribution to the understanding of contemporary Islam. He wrote and presented three television series, Stones of the Raj, Sufi Soul and Indian Journeys, the last of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002. In December 2005 his article on the madrasas of Pakistan was awarded the prize for Print Article of the Year at the 2005 FPA Media Awards.

Courtesy: www.penguinbooksindia.com




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