Читать книгу City of Djinns - William Dalrymple - Страница 10

MY FIRST ACTION on returning from Karachi was to retrieve from the Delhi Customs Shed my computer, printer, ghetto blaster and precious electric kettle. How they got there is a long and harrowing story.

Five days before, I had arrived at Delhi International Airport in good time for the Karachi flight. Getting thus far had taken a week of hard work, for in Delhi the simple matter of leaving the country can turn into some sort of mediaeval penitential exercise. For four days I spent my waking hours pacing the corridors of Hans Bhavan, headquarters of the Immigration Authorities, in the quest for exit permits; waited patiently in a queue outside the Pakistani Embassy Visa Section in search of an entry permit; then underwent five long, dull hours sitting in the Air India office while their ticketing computer lay disembowelled on the desk, undergoing emergency surgery at the hands of a computer ‘expert’.

As I strode through Immigration on the way to Customs, I congratulated myself on having got everything achieved: I had a boarding pass and a seat number; the tickets were in my hand; the appropriate stamps were in my passport. Proudly I handed it to the customs officer:

OFFICER (leafing through passport) Good day, sahib. I am thinking you are new in our India.

WD Yes. I’ve just moved here.

OFFICER But now you are planning to leave?

WD (cheerily) That’s right. Not for long though!

OFFICER (suddenly severe) When you arrived in our India, I am thinking you brought in one computer, one printer, one piece cassette recorder and one Swan electric kettle.

WD That’s very clever of you. Oh, I see! (The truth dawns) Your colleagues wrote them in the back of my passport when I arrived.

OFFICER Sahib, I do not understand. You are planning to leave our India but I am not seeing one computer, one printer (reads out list from passport).

WD (nervous now) No—but I’m not going for long. I won’t be needing the kettle. I’m going to be staying in a hotel. Ha! Ha!

OFFICER Ha! Ha! But sahib. You cannot leave India without your computer and other assorted import items.

WD Why not?

OFFICER This is regulation.

WD But this is absurd.

OFFICER (wobbling head) Yes, sahib. This is regulation.

WD But I’m only going for five days.

OFFICER This has no relevance, sahib. One day, one year it is same thing only.

WD (losing cool) Do you understand? I AM ONLY GOING AWAY FOR FIVE DAYS. My things are all at home. Of course I won’t bring my bloody kettle with me when I go away for a short trip. Any more than bring my fridge, my pots and pans or my air conditioning unit.

OFFICER Sahib—you are having imported air conditioning unit?

WD (backtracking fast) No, no. It was just a figure of speech …

OFFICER Sahib. Point is this. Maybe you have broken number one tip-top most important regulation and have sold your kettle or one piece cassette recorder.

WD (desperate) I promise you I haven’t sold anything. They are all in my flat. Please, I just want to go to Karachi.

OFFICER Sahib. I cannot see your items. So I cannot let you go.

It took twenty minutes of wrangling, pleading, cajoling and threats before we patched up a compromise. I would rush home and bring my ‘assorted items’ to the airport. I would show them to the officer. He would hold them as surety for my return. When I got back they would be returned.

On my return from Karachi the officer, Mr Prakash Jat, was true to his word. He was waiting for me, items safely secreted in his customs pound. I handed over the receipt.

‘You are lucky man,’ said Mr Jat. ‘We are breaking all regulations letting you out of India without your items.’ Then he added: ‘By the way, much am I liking your [reads from label] Discoblast Cassette Recorder with Anti-Woof and Flutter Function.’

Mr Jat gave my cassette recorder a loving caress, held it in his hands and admired its sleek lines and sturdy build. Then, casting a shady look on either side, he added in a lowered voice: ‘Sahib, you are wanting to sell? I give you good price.’

Outside, I was both pleased and surprised to see Balvinder Singh waiting for me. I say surprised because during the weeks prior to my departure, Balvinder had been playing truant. It had all begun in the middle of October when Balvinder was thrown out of his house by his wife and he had been forced to take refuge with the whores on G.B. Road. My friend feigned a lack of interest in his domestic drama—‘No problem, Mr William. Paying forty-fifty rupees, spending whole night. Too much fun, everyone too much happy’—but despite this bravado, as the month progressed Balvinder Singh began to show distinct signs of wear and tear. Absent from International Backside most of the morning, he would appear still unshaven in the early afternoon. No longer would he point out pretty girls in the street with a cheerful ‘You like, Mr William?’ More ominously, he began to discharge himself from duty promptly at five-thirty and head off at some speed towards the Khan Market Beer Shop.

Balvinder’s preferred tipple had always been a strong local brand called German Beer, whose large litre bottles were distinguished by the enormous swastika which decorated their labels. Balvinder had always been apt to down a litre or two of German Beer an evening, but through October his intake rose dramatically. Over the month empty beer bottles piled up in the taxi, so that every time we turned a corner a monumental crash of broken glass would be heard in the boot.

‘I am having some breakable items in my dickie,’ Balvinder would explain, a touch shamefaced.

Whether it was his spending on German Beer or Rajasthani whores that landed him in debt, one day towards the end of October Balvinder confronted me and asked whether he could borrow one thousand rupees. His creditors were after him, he said. A month earlier he had borrowed money from a friend, a local gunda; now the gunda was threatening to perform some impromptu surgery unless he could pay up. It all sounded a bit of a tall story, but I lent Balvinder the money. The next day he disappeared to the Punjab.

Now, a month later, the upsets seemed forgotten and he cheerily handed back all the money he owed. When I asked my friend about his gunda and his debts he just shrugged.

‘Big man, big problem,’ he said. ‘Small man, small problem.’

‘What do you mean, Balvinder?’

‘Rajiv Gandhi has big problem, Balvinder Singh has small problem.’

What he actually meant, I later discovered, was that his father, Punjab Singh, had bailed him out of trouble in exchange for a promise of future good behaviour. It lasted about a fortnight. In the meantime, for the first couple of weeks of November, Olivia and I enjoyed the new-leaf, clean-shaven, fresh-smelling Balvinder and the novel sensation of riding in a taxi that didn’t reek of brewery.

Two days after I returned from Karachi, I called Balvinder and asked him to take me up to Coronation Park.

When I first came to Delhi I had expected to find much that was familiar. I knew that India had been influenced by England since the Elizabethan period, and that the country had been forcibly shackled to Britain, first in the form of the East India Company, then the British Crown, for nearly two hundred years.

Moreover, in the mid-1980s, Britain was in the grip of a Raj revival. The British public wallowed in a nostalgic vision of the Raj as some sort of extended colonial soap opera—Upstairs, Downstairs writ large over the plains of Asia. The Jewel in the Crown was being shown on television, and the correspondence columns of The Times were full of complaints from old India hands about the alleged inaccuracies in Attenborough’s Gandhi. Academic presses were churning out books on the buildings of the Empire while the Booker shortlist could be counted on to include at least two books whose plot revolved around the Raj: The Siege of Krishnapur, Heat and Dust, Staying On and Midnight’s Children had all been winners in recent years.

Such was the enthusiasm at home for things Imperial Indian that I had assumed that India would be similarly obsessed with things Imperial British. Nothing, of course, could have been further from the truth. Instead, visiting the subcontinent less than forty years after the last sahib set sail back to Britain, I was intrigued by the degree to which India had managed to shed its colonial baggage. True, people spoke English, played cricket and voted in Westminster-style elections. Nevertheless, far from encountering the familiar, I was astonished how little evidence remained of two centuries of colonial rule. In the conversation of my Indian contemporaries, the British Empire was referred to in much the same way as I referred to the Roman Empire. For all the fond imaginings of the British, as far as the modern Delhi-wallah was concerned, the Empire was ancient history, an age impossibly remote from our own.

Nowhere was this distance clearer than at Coronation Park. The park stands on the site of the three great Delhi Durbars, the ceremonial climaxes of the entire Imperial pageant. Today, as Balvinder and I discovered after a long search, the site lies far north of the northernmost suburb of Old Delhi, stranded now amid a great flooded wilderness. As the eye sweeps over the plain, it seems a flat and uninteresting expanse, so level that a single bullock cart inching its way across the land appears as tall as some towering temple chariot. Then, to one side of the horizon, erupting suddenly from the marshy flatlands, there appears a vast marble image, an Indian Ozymandias.

The statue is sixty feet tall, a king enthroned with orb and sceptre; around him stands a crescent of stone acolytes, an ossified court marooned in an Arthurian wasteland of swamp, mud and camel-thorn. Creepers tangle through the folds in the robes; grass greens the Crown Imperial. At first it is possible to mistake the Ozymandias-image for a displaced Egyptian Pharaoh or a lost Roman Emperor. Only on closer examination does it become clear that it is George V, the King Emperor, surrounded by his viceroys.

The statue originally surmounted the central roundabout of New Delhi, the climax of the Kingsway (now Rajpath). It was hauled into retirement soon after Independence and now stands forgotten and unloved, an unwanted reminder of a period few Indians look back to with any nostalgia. Although the statue is only sixty years old, the world it came from seems as distant as that of Rameses II.

Perhaps it is language, the spoken word, which is the greatest indication of the distance travelled since 1947.

The English spoken by Indians—Hinglish—has of course followed its own idiosyncratic journey since the guardians of its purity returned home. Like American English, likewise emancipated by Britain’s colonial retreat, it has developed its own grammatical rules, its own syntax and its own vocabulary.

One of the great pleasures of our life in India has always been being woken on the dot of 7.30 every morning by Ladoo bearing ‘bed tea’ and the Times of India. The news is inevitably depressing stuff (‘400 Killed in Tamil Train Crash’, ‘150 Garrotted by Assam Separatists’ and so on), yet somehow the jaunty Times of India prose always manages to raise the tone from one of grim tragedy. There may have been a train crash, but at least the Chief Minister has air-dashed to the scene. Ten convented (convent-educated) girls may have been gang-raped in the Punjab, but thousands of students have staged a bandh (strike) and a dharna (protest) against such eve-teasing (much nicer than the bland Americanese ‘sexual harassment’). And so what if the protesters were then lathi (truncheon) charged by police jawans (constables)? In the Times of India such miscreants are always charge-sheeted in the end.

My favourite item is, however, the daily condoling. If the Times is to be believed, Indian politicians like nothing better than a quick condole; and certainly barely a day passes without a picture of, say, the Chief Minister of Haryana condoling Mrs Parvati Chaudhuri over the death of Mr Devi Chaudhuri, the director-general of All-India Widgets. Indeed, condoling shows every sign of becoming a growth industry. If a businessman has died but is not considered important enough to be condoled by the Chief Minister, it is becoming fashionable for his business colleagues to take out an illustrated advertisement and condole him themselves. The language of these advertisements tends to be even more inspired than that of the Times news columns. In my diary, I copied down this example from a November 1989 issue:

SAD DEMISE

With profound grief we have to condole the untimely passing of our beloved general manager MISTER DEEPAK MEHTA, thirty four years, who left us for heavenly abode in tragic circumstances (beaten to death with bedpost). Condole presented by bereft of Mehta Agencies (Private) Limited.

Perhaps the most striking testament to the sea-change in Indian English in the forty years since Independence lies not in what has survived—and been strangely, wonderfully mutated—but in what has died and completely disappeared.

The best guide to such linguistic dodos is Hobson Jobson: A Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases, originally published by John Murray in 1903. The book was written as a guide to those words which had passed from Sanskrit, Urdu, Persian and Arabic into English, and the list is certainly extraordinary: every time you wear pyjamas or a cummerbund; if ever you sit on the veranda of your bungalow reading the pundits in the newspapers or eat a stick of candy; indeed even if you are haunted by ghouls or have your cash stolen by thugs—then you are using a branch of English that could never have developed but for the trading and colonizing activities of the East India Company.

Yet perhaps the most interesting aspect of Hobson Jobson is how many of its words and phrases are stone cold dead, now utterly incomprehensible to a modern reader. In 1903 an Englishman could praise a cheroot as ‘being the real cheese’ (from the Hindi chiz, meaning thing) or claim his horse was the ‘best goont in Tibet’ (from the Hindi gunth, meaning a pony); and whether he was in the middle of some shikar (sport) relaxing with his friends in their chummery (bachelor quarters) or whoring with his rum-johny (mistress, from the Hindi ramjani, a dancing girl) he might reasonably expect to be understood.

Half of Hobson Jobson is filled with these dead phrases: linguistic relics of a world so distant and strange that it is difficult to believe that these words were still current in our own century. Yet clearly, in 1903, if a Jack (sepoy) did anything wrong he could expect to receive some pretty foul galee (abuse); if he were unlucky his chopper (thatched hut) might fall down in the mangoes (April showers); and if he forgot his goglet (water bottle) on parade he might well have been thrown out of the regiment for good.

To us, the vocabulary of the Raj now seems absurd, distant and comical, like the pretensions of the rotting statues in Coronation Park. Yet many who actually spoke this language are still alive in England. For them, the world of Hobson Jobson is less linguistic archaeology than the stuff of fraying memory.

Before I went to India I went to Cambridge to see a friend of my grandmother. Between the twenties and the forties, Iris Portal’s youth had been spent in that colonial Delhi that now seemed so impossibly dated. I wanted to hear what she remembered.

It was the last weekend of summer. Over the flat steppe of East Anglia tractors were beginning to plough the great wide plains of fenland stubble. A sharp wind gusted in from the coast; cloud-shadows drifted fast over the fields. On the Backs, the trees were just beginning to turn.

‘Welcome to my rabbit hutch,’ said Iris. ‘It’s not very big, but I flatter myself that it’s quite colourful.’

She was an alert and well-preserved old lady: owlish and intelligent. Her grey hair was fashionably cut and her voice was attractively dry and husky. Iris’s family had been Cambridge dons and although she had broken out and married into the army, there was still something residually academic in her measured gaze.

She sat deep in an armchair in her over-heated flat in a sheltered housing complex off the M11. Outside, beyond the car park, you could see the pavements and housing estates of suburban Girton. But inside, a small fragment of another world had been faithfully recreated. All around, the bookshelves were full of the great Imperial classics—Todd, Kipling, Fanny Parkes and Emily Eden—some riddled with the boreholes of bookish white ants. On one wall hung a small oil of houseboats on the Dal Lake; on another, a print of the Mughal Emperor Muhammed Shah Rangilla in the Red Fort. Beside it was an old map of 1930s Delhi.

Somehow the pictures and the books—and especially the dusty, old-buckram, yellow-paged library-scent of the books—succeeded in giving the thoroughly modern flat a faint whiff of the Edwardian, a distant hint of the hill-station bungalow.

‘You must give my love to dear old Delhi,’ said Iris. ‘Ah! Even now when I close my eyes I see …’ For a minute she left the sentence incomplete, then: ‘Pots of chrysanthemums!’ she said quite suddenly. ‘Rows and rows of chrysanthemums in little red pots! That’s what I remember best. Those and the ruins: riding out through the bazaars and out into the country. The Qutab Minar and moonlight picnics in Hauz Khas—a place we all thought was madly romantic. The tombs everywhere all tumbling down and black buck and peacocks and monkeys … Is it still like that?’

‘Up to a point,’ I said.

‘Dear, dear, dear old Delhi,’ she said. ‘How I envy you living there.’

She smiled a contented smile and rearranged herself in the armchair.

‘So,’ I ventured. ‘You were born in Delhi?’

‘No, no, no.’ Iris closed her eyes and drew a deep breath. ‘Certainly not. I was born in Simla in 1905 in a house called Newstead. It was immediately behind Snowdon, the Commander-in-Chief’s house. Curzon was then the Viceroy and Kitchener the Commander-in-Chief.’

Now she had mentioned Simla, I remembered that in the biography of Iris’s brother, the great Rab Butler, I had seen a sepia photograph of the two of them at a children’s party in the Simla Viceregal Lodge. In the image you could clearly see Iris’s plump little face peeping out from a Victorian cocoon of taffeta and white silk.

‘So you spent your childhood in Simla?’

‘No. I only spent the first five summers of my life in Simla,’ she said, correcting me again. ‘Then I was brought back to England. I went to school in a madhouse on the beach of Sandgate under the Folkestone cliffs. It was a sort of avant-garde Bedales-type place. Perfectly horrible. We were supposed to be a Greek Republic. We made our own rules, wore aesthetic uniforms and I don’t know what else.’

‘Did you miss India?’

‘I thought of nothing else. India was home.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘All I wanted was India, a horse of my own and a dashing cavalry escort. When my mother and I arrived back in Bombay we immediately caught the train up to Delhi. I remember vividly the joy of coming in the driveway and seeing all those rows and rows of chrysanthemums in their pots and thinking: "Ah! I’m back!"

‘Everything was as I remembered it. My father’s bearer, Gokhul, was a little fatter than before. He had been with my father since he was a boy and was now a rather grand figure: he used to walk around with a great brass badge on his front. Otherwise everything was unchanged.’

Iris spoke slowly and precisely as if making a mental effort to relay her memories with absolute accuracy.

‘It was … 1922, I suppose. The Government of India was in Delhi by that time, waiting for New Delhi to be completed. We were all living in the Civil Lines [of Old Delhi]. There was no Secretariat and all the Government offices were in Nissen huts. But the officials’ bungalows were all in beautiful gardens. You know how things grow in Delhi. The jacarandas …’

‘Had you come out to work?’ I asked.

‘No, no. My life was extremely frivolous. I had been very highbrow at school. No one ever talked about anything except Browning. But in Delhi people would have been horrified if they discovered you read poetry. The English in India were not a very cultured lot. The atmosphere was too giddy: it was all riding, picnics, clubs, dances, dashing young men and beautiful polo players …’ She smiled. ‘Looking back of course, the whole set-up was very odd. There was such snobbery. Everyone was graded off into sections. One would never have dreamt of going anywhere with someone from the Public Works Department …’ She blinked with mock horror.

‘The most snobbish event of all was the polo, though the Delhi Hunt was rather wonderful in its own way. All the Viceregal staff—who were usually rather interesting and attractive—came out in their Ratcatcher—black coats and so on: in Ooty everyone wore pink, but in Delhi it was only the whippers-in and the master who were allowed to. It was taken very seriously. The hounds—rather dapper ones—were imported from England. I used to get up before dawn and motor down to the Qutab Minar in my father’s T-model Ford. A syce would have been sent down the night before with the pony. Then, as soon as the sun rose, we would gallop about this dry countryside chasing after the jackals.

‘But much more worthwhile than hunting the poor old jackal was going hawking with Umer Hyat Khan of the Tiwana clan. I expect you know all about him. He was a big landowner from the Northern Punjab: rather like a Highland laird. Umer Hyat was a member of the first legislative assembly and whenever the Assembly was in session he would come down to Delhi with his horses, his hawks and his hounds … Before dawn we would canter over the Jumna by the Bridge of Boats. The horses were sent ahead. There were all these splendid tribesmen with hawks on their wrists and greyhounds straining on the leash. We rode out like a mediaeval company. When the hounds had stirred up the hares, the hawks were let fly.

‘After I had been in Delhi for a while I began to sober up a little. My father set me down at a table to learn Urdu with a bearded Munshi. Soon afterwards I met Sir John Thompson at a big dinner at Viceregal Lodge. He was Commissioner for Delhi and an old friend of my father. A very intelligent man: he could speak several Indian languages, understood Sanskrit and so on. He said to me: "What do you do with yourself all day?" and I replied: "I sleep late because I’ve been to a party then I go for a ride and …" He said, a little severely: "Has it never occurred to you to study Indian history?" I said "No" and he replied: "I’ll lend you a book on the history of Delhi. You read that and see if it doesn’t inspire you to look around"—which indeed it did.

‘From that moment onwards, wherever I went, I was poking my nose about, looking at the ruins. Most afternoons I used to ride down to the Purana Qila—I loved the Purana Qila—and sit at the top of the Sher Mandal thinking of poor old Humayun tripping down those stairs and killing himself. I always used to come down very carefully. Of course it was all so lonely then. Humayun’s Tomb was absolutely out in the blue. It was open land, strewn with tumbledown tombs and the rubble of ages. Beyond the plains were dotted with black buck and peacocks. You could ride anywhere …’

‘So this was all before Lutyens’s Delhi went up?’ I interrupted.

‘Well, I suppose the building was just about beginning.’

‘Did you ever meet the man himself?’

‘Who? Lutyens? Oh yes. He was a great friend of my parents.’

‘What was he like?’

‘Well, he was very taken with my mother. Because my father’s name was Monty, he used to call her Carlo. That was typical Lutyens. Always making these rather childish jokes.

‘He took me around Viceroy’s House when it was only two to three feet high. What I will always remember was going to one of the staff bungalows. He said: "Look—I planned this with a central space in the middle and eight doors leading off." Some of these doors just led into housemaid’s cupboards. "I thought it would be terribly funny," said old Lutyens—he was absolutely thrilled with this, "that if people had had too much to drink at a big party, they’d come home and they wouldn’t know which was their door. They’d all end up in the cupboards."’

Iris frowned. ‘He was such a silly man. But of course I greatly admire his work. I love New Delhi. I always thought it was so much better than Washington. And you know, people forget that that magnificent city of Delhi was built on such a flimsy basis—both human and material. There was no proper scaffolding or any of the equipment that they have now: no cranes or mechanical things to help with the lifting of weights … I can remember seeing them, these little wizened people carrying great hods of bricks and vast bags of cement. There were myriads of them: climbing up rickety bamboo ladders tied together with string, and all of it getting more precarious as it got higher …

‘Of course, people of my father’s generation hated the whole thing. He and my uncle Harcourt thought it was frightfully extravagant, and that those lakhs of money could have been far better used elsewhere. Moreover they always felt that the prophecy—whoever builds a new city in Delhi will lose it—would come true. If ever anybody raised the subject of New Delhi my father would always quote the Persian couplet in a most gloomy voice. And of course it did come true. Whoever has built a new city in Delhi has always lost it: the Pandava brethren, Prithviraj Chauhan, Feroz Shah Tughluk, Shah Jehan … They all built new cities and they all lost them. We were no exception.’

I could see Iris was tiring. It was now dark outside and I knew I was soon going to have to leave her. But before I went I wanted to ask one last question.

‘In retrospect,’ I said. ‘Do you think British rule was justified?’

Iris mulled over the question before answering.

‘Well, at the time we certainly didn’t think of ourselves as wicked imperialists,’ she said, answering slowly. ‘Of course not. But you see, although people of my generation were very keen on Gandhi and Indian Independence, we were still very careless. We didn’t give much thought to the question of what on earth we were doing to that country and its people.

‘That said, I can’t forget the sacrifices made by the "wicked" imperialists over the centuries—the graves, so many very young, the friends I have had, and what good people many of them were.

‘But on balance I think you must never take land away from a people. A people’s land has a mystique. You can go and possibly order them about for a bit, perhaps introduce some new ideas, build a few good buildings, but then in the end you must go away and die in Cheltenham.’ Iris sighed. ‘And that, of course, is exactly what we did.’

I walked around Lutyens’s Delhi that November, thinking of Iris. It seemed incredible that someone who had been taken around the foundations of the Viceroy’s House—now the President’s Palace—by Lutyens himself could still be alive and well. The buildings appeared so solid, so timeless, so ancient. It was like meeting someone who had been taken around the Parthenon by Pericles.

To best appreciate New Delhi I used to walk to it from the Old City. Leaving behind the press and confusion of Shahjehanabad—the noise and the heat, the rickshaws and the barrow-boys, the incense and the sewer-stink—I would find myself suddenly in a gridiron of wide avenues and open boulevards, a scheme as ordered and inevitable as a Bach fugue. Suddenly the roads would be empty and the air clean. There was no dust, no heat: all was shaded, green and cool. Ahead, at the end of the avenue, rose the great chattri which once held the statue of George V. Arriving there at the end of the green tunnel, I would turn a right angle and see the cinnamon sky stretching out ahead, no longer veiled by a burqa of buildings or trees. It was like coming up for air.

This was Rajpath—once the Kingsway—one of the great ceremonial ways of the world. It was planned as an Imperial Champs Elysées—complete with India Gate, its own butter-coloured Arc de Triomphe. But it was far wider, far greener, far more magnificent than anything comparable in Europe. On either side ran wide lawns giving on to fountains and straight avenues of eucalyptus and casuarina. Beyond, canals running parallel to the road reflected the surroundings with mirror-like fidelity.

Ahead, high on Raisina Hill, crowning an almost infinite perspective, rose a silhouette of domes, towers and cupolas. As I drew near, Herbert Baker’s two Secretariats would rise precipitously out of the plain, their projecting porticoes flanking the hemispheric dome of the Viceroy’s House. East fused with West. Round arches and classical Greek colonnades were balanced by latticework stone screens and a ripple of helmet-like chattris. At the very centre of the complex, the resolution of every perspective in New Delhi, stood Lutyens’s staggering neo-Buddhist dome.

However many times I revisited the complex, I would always be amazed by the brilliantly orchestrated flirtation of light and shade—the dim colonnades offset by massive walls of sun-blasted masonry. Yet the most startling conceit of all lay in the use of colour: the play of the two different shades of pink Agra sandstone; one pale and creamy; the other a much darker burnt crimson. The two different colours were carefully arranged, the darker at the bottom as if it was somehow heavier, yet with the two contrasting tones blending as effortlessly into one another as they once did in the quarry.

It was superb. In the dusk, as the sun sank behind the great dome of the Viceroy’s House, the whole vista would turn the colour of attar of roses. I would realize then, without hesitation, that I was looking at one of the greatest marriages of architecture and urban planning ever to have left the drawing board.

Nevertheless, the more often I came and looked, the more I felt a nagging reservation. This had less to do with aesthetics than with comparisons with other massive schemes of roughly similar date that the complex brought to mind. Then one evening, as I proceeded up the cutting and emerged to find Baker’s Secretariats terminating in the wide portico of the Viceroy’s House, with this great imperial mass of masonry towering all around me I suddenly realized where I had seen something similar, something equally vast, equally dwarfing, before: Nuremberg.

In its monstrous, almost megalomaniac scale, in its perfect symmetry and arrogant presumption, there was a distant but distinct echo of something Fascist or even Nazi about the great acropolis of Imperial Delhi. Certainly it is far more beautiful than anything Hitler and Mussolini ever raised: Lutyens, after all, was a far, far greater architect than Albert Speer. Yet the comparison still seemed reasonable. For, despite their very many, very great differences, Imperial India, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany all belonged to comparable worlds. All were to different extents authoritarian; all made much of magnificent display; all were built on a myth of racial superiority and buttressed in the last resort by force. In the ceremonial buildings of all three, it was an impression of the might and power of the Imperial State that the architects aimed above all to convey.

To do so they used the same architectural vocabulary: great expanses of marble, a stripped-down classicism, a fondness for long colonnades and a love of Imperial heraldic devices: elephants’ heads, lions couchant, massive eagles with outstretched wings. Of course, much of the similarity is due to the fact that Speer and Lutyens were commissioned to build monuments of state at roughly the same time. Moreover, Speer appears to have drawn on Lutyens’s experience and style. Yet there can be no doubt that New Delhi was very deliberately built as an expression of the unconquerable might of the Raj. As Lord Stamfordham, Private Secretary to George V, wrote in a letter articulating the King Emperor’s views on his new capital: ‘We must let [the Indian] see for the first time the power of Western civilization …’

In New Delhi, as in Fascist Milan or Nazi Berlin, the individual is lost; the scale is not human, but super-human; not national, but super-national: it is, in a word, Imperial. The impression of the architect as bully receives confirmation in the inscription that Lutyens ordered to be raised above the great recessed ivan gateway of the Secretariats.

For those who like to believe in the essential benevolence of the British Empire it is a depressing discovery, for it must be one of the most patronizing inscriptions ever raised in a public place:

LIBERTY WILL NOT DESCEND TO A PEOPLE;

A PEOPLE MUST RAISE THEMSELVES TO LIBERTY;

IT IS A BLESSING WHICH MUST BE EARNED

BEFORE IT CAN BE ENJOYED.

I had brought out to Delhi with me a copy of the collected letters of Lutyens. One evening in November I sat in the shade of the chattris beside the two Secretariats, facing down the Rajpath towards India Gate and reading through them. As I did so, I tried to bring the creator of Imperial Delhi into focus in my own mind.

The picture that the letters give of their author is a mixed one. There are certainly elements of the joker and buffoon that Iris had described: Lutyens incessantly doodles on the writing paper, turning the P & O crests on successive letterheads into a tiger, a man with a turban and an elephant. His first action after arriving in India is to play a game of musical chairs (‘Mrs Brodie who weighs 20 stone or more was the most energetic of the party and broke two chairs entirely [amid] many a scrimmage and wild shriek …’). Later, on seeing the hideous government buildings of Simla, Lutyens writes that they are ‘a piece of pure folly such as only Englishmen can achieve: if one were told the monkeys had built them one would have said what wonderful monkeys, they must be shot in case they do it again.’

This playfulness is balanced by ample evidence of Lutyens’s tenacity and stubbornness; a stubbornness which in the end saved New Delhi from both the aesthetic whims of successive philistine Viceroys—Lord Hardinge was determined to build the entire scheme in the Indian version of Victorian mock-Gothic, the horrible Indo-Saracenic style—and from the cost-cutting penny-pinching interference of the civil servants.

But the letters also confirmed my hunch concerning Lutyens’s autocratic tendencies. Like some other of his English contemporaries, he was clearly disillusioned with Parliamentary democracy and found in the Raj what he regarded as an ideal—an enlightened despotism: ‘I am awfully impressed by the Civil Service,’ he wrote to his wife, early on in his Indian travels. ‘I wish they would abolish the House of Commons and all representative government and start the system in England.’ Later, in a moment of fury with a negligent workman, he expressed his opinion that the Empire’s subjects ‘ought to be reduced to slavery and not given the rights of man at all …

Yet perhaps the overwhelming surprise of the letters is Lutyens’s extraordinary intolerance and dislike of all things Indian. Even by the standards of the time, the letters reveal him to be a bigot, though the impression is one of bumbling insularity rather than jack-booted malevolence. Indians are invariably referred to as ‘blacks’, ‘blackamoors’, ‘natives’ or even ‘niggers’. They are ‘dark and ill-smelling’, their food is ‘very strange and frightening’ and they ‘do not improve with acquaintance’. The helpers in his architect’s office he describes as ‘odd people with odd names who do those things that bore the white man’. On another occasion he writes of the ‘sly slime of the Eastern mind’ and ‘the very low intelligence of the natives’. ‘I do not think it possible for the Indians and whites to mix freely’, he concludes. ‘They are very, very different and I cannot admit them on the same plane as myself.’

Considering that Lutyens managed to fuse Eastern and Western aesthetics more successfully than any other artist since the anonymous sculptors of Gandhara (who produced their Indo-Hellenic Buddhas in the wake of Alexander the Great), his dislike of Indian art and architecture is particularly surprising: ‘Moghul architecture is cumbrous ill-constructed building,’ he writes in one letter. ‘It is essentially the building style of children [and] very tiresome to the Western intelligence.’ At one stage, after visiting Agra, he is grudgingly forced to admit that ‘some of the work is lovely’, but he attributes these qualities to an (imaginary) Italian influence.

In the end one is left with the same paradox confronted by lovers of Wagner: how could someone with such objectionable views and so insular a vision have managed to produce such breathtaking works of art? Here was a man capable of building some of the most beautiful structures created in the modern world, but whose prejudices blinded him to the beauty of the Taj Mahal; a man who could fuse the best of East and West while denying that the Eastern elements in his own buildings were beautiful.

Authoritarian regimes tend to leave the most solid souvenirs; art has a strange way of thriving under autocracy. Only the vanity of an Empire—an Empire emancipated from democratic constraints, totally self-confident in its own judgement and still, despite everything, assured of its own superiority—could have produced Lutyens’s Delhi.

Pandit Nehru wrote: ‘New Delhi is the visible symbol of British power, with all its ostentation and wasteful extravagance.’ He was right, of course, but that is only half the story. It is also the finest architectural artefact created by the British Empire, and preferable in every way to Nehru’s disastrous commission of a hideous new city by Le Corbusier at Chandigarh. Chandigarh is now an urban disaster, a monument to stained concrete and discredited modernism; but Imperial Delhi is now more admired and loved than perhaps ever before. Nevertheless, in its patronizing and authoritarian after-taste, Lutyens’s New Delhi remains as much a monument to the British Empire’s failings as to its genius.

That month I began to make enquiries to try and track down British stayers-on from Imperial Delhi. For a while I failed to come up with anything: those few who had chosen to remain after 1947 seemed to have either died or recently emigrated. But for the transitory diplomatic community, the British had totally disappeared from Delhi.

Then, in mid-November, I was told about two old English ladies who now lived in the mountains above Simla. They had moved to the hills in the sixties, I was told, but before then they had spent their working lives in Delhi. If I wanted reminiscences of Imperial Delhi, said my informer, then Phyllis and Edith Haxby were exactly what I was looking for. In the event, when I flew up to see them, the two old ladies produced few Delhi memories. But their attitudes gave a sad insight into the fate of those Britons who not so long ago had dominated Raj Delhi, and who had opted to stay on in India after the Empire which created them had dissolved.

Their house had once been quite grand—a rambling half-timbered affair with a wide veranda and cusped Swiss gables. But the Haxbys’ estate had clearly fallen on hard times. A lint of withered spiders’ webs hung from the beams of the veranda. Only thin, peeling strips of burnt sienna indicated that the house had ever been painted. A tangle of thorns had overcome the near-side of the building and docks and ragwort grew from between the paving stones of the path.

At first I thought no one was at home. But after ten minutes of knocking on doors and peering through windows, I was rewarded with the sight of one of the sisters hobbling across her sitting-room. She undid the multiple bolts of the door and slumped down in one of the wickerwork chairs of the veranda.

‘And who are you?’ she asked.

I explained, and to make conversation complimented her on the view from her front door.

‘It may be beautiful to you,’ she said abruptly. ‘But it’s not beautiful to us. We want to go back home.’

Phyllis Haxby was a frail old woman with mottled brown skin and thin, toothpick legs. Her tweed skirt was extravagantly darned and her thick brown stockings were shredded with a jigsaw of tears and ladders.

‘We want to sell up,’ she continued. ‘We’ve been through a very bad time. There are prostitutes living all over the place, making life hell for us. They say we’re English and shouldn’t be here. After seventy-eight years!’

Phyllis grunted angrily and began rapping on the front door with her stick: ‘Edith! Edith! There’s a boy here to see us. Says he’s British. He wants to know about Delhi.’

Then she turned around and began talking to me in a stage whisper: ‘She had a fall today. The prostitutes put dope down the chimney. It makes her want to sleep. She fell on the fender—bleeding from eight a.m. until after lunch. They’re trying to drive us out, you see.’

‘It’s not just dope down the chimney,’ said Edith, who had at this point appeared at the door. ‘They come through the floorboards at night.’

‘Through the floorboards? Are you sure?’ I asked.

‘Of course I’m sure. When we’re asleep they put stuff in our eyes to make us go blind. Every day my sight gets a little worse. You’ve no idea what we’ve gone through.’

‘You know something,’ said Phyllis, leaning forward towards me and continuing to speak in her conspiratorial stage whisper. ‘They’re all Jews. All of ’em. They’re as fair as lilies but they wear these brown masks to pass off as natives. They’ve been persecuting us for twenty years.’

‘Thirty years, Phyllis.’

‘Since Partition, in fact.’

‘But we’re not going to give in, are we, darling? We’re not going to cut and run.’

At this point the drizzle which had followed me to the bungalow turned into a downpour. The water dripped through the roof of the veranda and we decided to move inside. From the sitting-room I could see the half-lit bedroom. To one side of the bed was an upturned chest of drawers, on the other an inverted ironing board.

‘That’s to stop the Jewish prostitutes from coming in through the floorboards,’ said Phyllis, seeing where I was looking.

‘But they still come down the chimney,’ said Edith.

‘Oh—they’ll do anything to drive us out. They’ve even started to watch us bathe. They peer through the window as if we were some sort of ha’penny peep show.’

We arranged ourselves around a table and Phyllis poured the tea.

‘Just look at my hands shake,’ she said.

‘It’s the prostitutes’ dope,’ said Edith.

‘Makes me shake like a Quaker and dribble like a dog. I used to be hale and hearty, too.’

‘Very hale and hearty, my sister. Those prostitutes should be shot on sight.’

The two sisters fussed around with their teacups, trying to spoon in the sugar and the powdered milk before their shakes sprinkled the stuff over the table. At length, when this was achieved and they had relaxed, I turned the conversation towards their memories of Delhi in the old days.

‘Oh it was such fun. We were young and blond and had admirers. The Delhi season lasted from October until March. At night we went to dances and drank champagne—real champagne—and by day we would sit outside and watch the soldiers riding past, four abreast. Those were the days.’

‘But my God have things changed. Imagine—I now do my own sweeping …’

‘… and the cooking and the cleaning and the laundry. Us—Colonel’s daughters.’

‘Our father was the Colonel of the 23rd Punjabis. I told the grocery boy last week. The Twenty-Thirds! He couldn’t believe such people lived in such … in such …’

‘Simplicity,’ said Edith.

‘Exactly,’ said Phyllis. ‘Simplicity. You know, Mr Dalrymple, you people today can have no idea what India was like before. It was … just like England.’

‘Shut up, darling! The prostitutes—they’ll report us. They’ve got microphones. Speak softly.’

‘I will not. The wickedness! Tell them to go to the devil.’

The two sisters sipped angrily at their tea. They were silent for a second, and I again tried to turn the conversation back towards Delhi.

‘Did you ever meet Lutyens?’ I asked.

Phyllis wasn’t listening: ‘And you know the worst thing. Those Jewish prostitutes. They tried to …’

‘Don’t Phyllis.’

‘I will. You can’t gag a Haxby of Haxby. They tried to put us in a madhouse. We went out for a walk and they started to drag us down the road. And I said: "This isn’t the way home."’

‘Damn cheek. A colonel’s daughter.’

‘The warders were very nice to us. We stayed there for two weeks. Then a young police officer came and said: "Who put you here?" He went to the I.G.—the Inspector General—and by four o’clock we were back here. The I.G. ordered us to be brought home. All the other inmates were very jealous.’

‘I’ll say.’

‘Imagine putting two elderly people in a madhouse. Those prostitutes—they’re from Baghdad, you see. They were able to do it because they have a money-minting machine and were able to bribe the inspectors.’

‘They use us as a respectable cover for their operations. That’s why we’re going to leave this place—as soon as we can sell the house. We’ve had enough of Simla.’

‘More than enough. We’ve had an offer for one lakh rupees [about £2000] from this man. If we can find someone to give us two lakhs we’ll be off home.’

‘We thought we’d try Ooty first. Get a taxi to Delhi …’

‘Dear old Delhi.’

‘… then a flight to Coimbatore, then a car up to the Nilgiris.’

‘It used to be lovely in Ooty. Just like England.’

‘But if we have no luck there we thought we’d try Wales. With two lakhs you could get a nice house in Wales I’d have thought.’

Looking at my watch I saw it was time to leave: my train back was leaving in less than an hour. I got up, said my goodbyes, and promised to send them the English brassieres and stockings they had asked for—they seemed to have trouble with domestic Indian brands: ‘Indian women have the strangest shaped breasts,’ explained Edith.

Both of the sisters heaved themselves up and saw me to the door. But just as I was setting off down the garden path, Phyllis called me back. I thought that maybe she had finally remembered some forgotten snippet of Delhi gossip.

‘One last thing,’ she said, clenching my hand in her claw-like grip. ‘Just watch out.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Look after yourself,’ she said earnestly. ‘Don’t drink anything strange—or anything bitter. Watch out for the smell of bitter almonds. The Jews will all be after you now—after you’ve tried to help the Haxbys. You won’t be safe anywhere.’

I thanked her again and opened the wicket gate. As I closed it, I heard her shouting behind me.

‘Take it,’ she called, ‘from a colonel’s daughter.’