Historic Buildings
Delhi is the most historic city in all historic India.
It may not be the oldest—who shall say which is the oldest among rivals all coeval with time?—though it puts in a claim for a respectable middle-age, dating from 1000 B.C. or so. It has at least one authentic monument which is certainly fourteen or fifteen hundred years old. At that time Delhi’s master called himself Emperor of the World, and emperors, at least of India, have ruled there almost ever since. Mohammed, an Afghan of Ghor, took it in 1193; Tamerlane, the Mogul, sacked it two hundred years later; Nadir Shah, the Persian, in 1739; Ahmed Shah Durani, another Afghan, in 1756; the Marathas took it three years later. Half a century on, in 1803, General Lake took the capital of India for Britain. And British it has been ever since—except for those few months in 1857, when Mutiny brought the ghost of the Mogul empire into the semblance of life again; till Nicholson stormed the breach in the Kashmir Bastion, and dyed Delhi British for ever with his blood.
Look from the Ridge, whence the columns marched out to that last capture: the battered trophy of so many conquerors remains wonderfully fresh and fair. It seems more like a wood than a city. The rolls of green are only spangled with white, as if it were a suburb of villas standing in orchards. Only the snowy domes and tall minarets, the cupolas and gilded pinnacles, betray the still great and populous city that nestles below you and takes breath after her thousand troubles.
Let us go back to the city. Here at least is the Jumma Musjid, the great mosque, saved complete out of the storms—a baby of little more than two hundred years, to be sure, but still something. It is said to be the largest mosque in the world—a vast stretch of red sandstone and white marble and gold upstanding from a platform reached on three sides by flights of steps so tall, so majestically wide, that they are like a stone mountain tamed into order and proportion at an emperor’s will. Above the brass-mounted doors rise red portals so huge that they almost dwarf the whole—red galleries above them, white marble domes above them, white marble minarets rising higher yet, with pillars and cupolas and gilded pinnacles above all. Beside the gateways the walls of the quadrangle seem to creep along the ground; then, at the corners, rise towers with more open chambers, more cupolas and gilded pinnacles. Within, above the cloistered quadrangle, bulge three pure white domes—not hemispheres, like Western domes, but complete globes, only sliced away at the base and tapering to a spike at the top—and a slender minaret flanks each side.
The whole, to Western eyes, has a strange effect. Our own buildings are tighter together, gripped and focused more in one glance; over the Jumma Musjid your eye must wander, and then the mind must connect the views of the different parts. If you look at it near you cannot see it all; if far, it is low and seems to straggle. The West could hardly call it beautiful: it has proportion, but not compass. Therefore it does not abase you, as other great buildings do: somehow you have a feeling of patronage towards it. Yet it is most light and graceful with all its bulk: it seems to suit India, thus spread out to get its fill of the warm sun. It looks rich and lavish, as if space were of no account to it.
You have passed below the cloud-capped towers, out of the gorgeous palaces—and here is Silver Street, Delhi’s main thoroughfare. The pageant fades, and you plunge into the dense squalor which is also India. Along the houses run balconies and colonnades; here also you see vistas of pillars and lattice-work, but the stone is dirty, the stucco peels, the wood lacks paint. The houses totter and lean together. The street is a mass of squatting, variegated people; bulls, in necklaces of white and yellow flowers, sleep across the pavements, donkeys stroll into the shops, goats nibble at the vegetables piled for sale down the centre of the street, a squirrel is fighting with a caged parrot. Here is a jeweller’s booth, gay with tawdry paint; next, a baker’s, with the shopkeeper snoring on his low counter, and everything an inch thick with dust. At one step you smell incense; at the next, garbage.
Inimitable, incongruous India! And coming out of the walls, still crumbling from Nicholson’s cannon, you see mill-chimneys blackening the sky. Delhi, with local cotton, they tell you, can spin as fine as Manchester. One more incongruity! The iron pillar, the ruined mosque, the jewelled halls, the shabby street, and now the clacking mill. That is the last of Delhi’s myriad reincarnations.