Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Nine 1911

I do not deny the glamour of the name of Delhi or the stories that cling about its dead and forgotten cities. But I venture to say this, that if we want to draw happy omens for the future the less we say about the history of Delhi the better. Modern Delhi is only 250 years old. It was only the capital of the Moguls in the expiring years of their régime, and it was only the capital of their collective rule for little more than 100 years. Of course, there were capitals there before it, but all have perished, one after another. We know that the whole environment of Delhi is a mass of deserted ruins and graves, and they present to the visitor, I think, the most solemn picture you can conceive of the mutability of human greatness… His Majesty’s Government will be on much surer ground if instead of saying anything about the dead capitals of the past they try to create a living capital in the future.

— Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India, speaking in the House of Lords in February 1912 against the British government’s recent decision to move the Indian capital from Calcutta to Delhi¹⁹

With the assaults of 1857, another metropolis, it seemed, had joined the perennial fate of cities built at Delhi. And in the years thereafter, Delhi became an image for European travellers of the impermanence and folly of human ambition. In 1912, an Italian poet landed there in search of heat to ease his tuberculosis. Journeying southwards from Shahjahanabad across the plain that led to the Qutub Minar, he witnessed a:

… transition from the living city to the city of the dead. Finally there are no more houses inhabited by humans; those populated by monkeys have begun… The ruins extend into infinity; the entire steppe, as far as the eye can see and beyond, is the vast cemetery of a city destroyed and rebuilt ten times over in the space of four thousand years… Here, in this desert of rubbish, the reigning chaos of neglect and oblivion is such that the researcher must have the giddy sensation of being hurled five hundred, a thousand, thirty thousand years back into the abyss of time: from the final Islamic splendour of the Great Moghol to the dark Brahminism of the imposing early Jain and Pali structures, in the dim night of the Vedic origins…

I find native and European scholars on the job: archaeologists, experts, architects making models and taking measurements. England is readying for a colossal undertaking: breaking into the bone cave these dead cities are immured within, restoring the ruins, and reordering them decorously in the light of day. A worthy undertaking, yet one I doubt will be favourable to the poetry of these memories. I do indeed thank heaven I am able to visit them today in their state of desolate neglect.²⁰

But the poet viewed these goings-on through a tuberculose haze. The “colossal undertaking” for which England was readying was not one of restoration. Their project, like so many Delhi rulers before them, was to level and build again. From that year onwards, the great majority of these “unending ruins” was razed and the next ‘New Delhi’ spread out, like a fresh table cloth over the remains of yesterday’s dinner, on top.

The declaration by King George V that the capital of British India would be moved from Calcutta to Delhi had come in 1911. Calcutta had become a problematic centre for the British. Educated Bengalis, increasingly dismayed by their political dispossession, had made the British capital also the principal laboratory of anti-imperial thought. Gauche attempts to control Bengali unrest through policies of ‘divide and rule’ had backfired. The British decided to run elsewhere, and Delhi was the obvious choice. In a letter of 1911, the viceroy, Lord Hardinge, wrote:

Delhi is still a name to conjure with. It is intimately associated in the minds of Hindus with sacred legends which go back even beyond the dawn of history… The Purana Kila still marks the site of the city which they founded and called Indraprastha, barely three miles from the south gate of the modern city of Delhi. To the Mahommedans it would be a source of unbounded gratification to see the ancient capital of the Moguls restored to its proud position as the seat of Empire. Throughout India, as far south as the Mahommedan conquest extended, every walled town has its ‘Delhi gate’… The change would strike the imagination of the people of India as nothing else could do, and would send a wave of enthusiasm throughout the country, and would be accepted by all as the assertion of an unfaltering determination to maintain British rule in India. It would be hailed with joy by the Ruling Chiefs and the races of Northern India, and would be warmly welcomed by the vast majority of Indians throughout the continent.²¹

But despite these appeals to Delhi’s glorious past, the British were determined to build there a city that would negate everything it had previously been. The imperialists would design a city so geometrically European that it would defeat, with its very layout, the benighted orientalism of all its past and set the stage for a new, enlightened future.

In the British city there would be none of those narrow streets with which Shahjahanabad — and numberless other places with a similar climate, from Toledo to Venice to Baghdad — had prevented direct sun from reaching pedestrians. Such tiny lanes, with their unpredictable twists and windowless walls, filled Englishmen with unease. British urban theory was still governed by nineteenth-century ‘miasmic’ myths of pathology, which held that diseases arose out of bad or stale air, and, from the British perspective, Shahjahanabad was a breeding ground, not only for the insidious spells and complots of the oriental, whom white men would never be able to pursue through such winding alleys, but also for foul vapours, madness and disease. The British city would be conceived to attract light and air to disperse the miasma: the architect, Edwin Lutyens, was a lover of the English countryside and took his inspiration from the theories of Ebenezer Howard, whose book propounding the material and spiritual advantages of garden cities was just then generating an intellectual movement on both sides of the Atlantic. Lutyens determined that Delhi would be a combination of city and countryside, like Howard’s utopia: buildings would be sparse, low, and separated by expansive gardens; wide roads and parks would keep the city fresh and well ventilated; a large lake, formed by damming the Yamuna, would give city dwellers access to water and open skies (though this part of the plan was never realised). All in all, a reversal: where Shahjahanabad’s streets were narrow and labyrinthine, New Delhi would have vast, geometrical avenues; where commerce in the old city took place in a profusion of packed bazaars, it would be confined in the new to a pillared circle, eventually named Connaught Circus. Where Shahjahanabad was a city, it could be said, New Delhi was a bureaucratic village — for though it would contain administrative buildings of stupendous size and grandeur, its dispersed, pastoral layout, whose open spaces were emptily monumental, left few places for any kind of urban bustle. There was almost no provision in the plan for venues of pleasure and congregation, nor for merchants and their trades, nor for housing for the poor — all of which had been conspicuous features of the old city.

Like previous building projects on this left bank of the Yamuna river, New Delhi was a heroic enterprise. Thirty thousand workers levelled the land with pickaxes and explosives, while trains brought continual shipments of stone and steel on purpose-built railway lines. Dust and noise erupted in choking clouds from the twenty-two-acre masonry yard where stone was sawn and chiselled into shape, while smoke poured out from the dozens of kilns where the bricks were fired. From the Italian poet’s “vast cemetery” emerged the sketch of a city, at the centre of which sprawled an implausibly vast hexagonal plaza from whose points diverged six boulevards of astonishing breadth towards the ancient cities of Delhi. Observers must have had a sense of folly, for while the first levels of the buildings gave proof of stupefying scale and bewildering style, the city itself remained utterly conceptual, without inhabitants or culture. It was as radical as new beginnings could be: it was not at all certain how, or even if, it could work. When the First World War drained the enterprise of money and energy there were many calls, in fact, for its abandonment; but still the work pressed on, and the new capital of British India was finished within two decades.

It was a city of surprisingly graceful buildings — far more so than those built in London at the same time — and it recalled, quite self-consciously, the ethereal splendour of Athens and Washington, DC. As it came to life, the alien city, whose sapling-lined avenues petered out into the dusty brush, also introduced to this place an entirely unaccustomed ethos.

In order to turn their majestic emptiness into a real city, the British needed people to live in it, which few wished to do. Most of those managing the building project, British and Indian, lodged their families in the old city, or just outside its walls in Civil Lines, where there was commerce, social life and entertainment. In order to get these people — the suppliers of labour, stone, furniture, alcohol, food, and all the rest — to move into the new city, the administrators offered them large plots of land at a greatly discounted rate. So the contractors came. They snapped up sites in the centre of the city for their own mansions, and also bought up large areas of city land as investments. Rich already from the money they had made, by fair means and foul, during Delhi’s construction, the estates they now owned in the centre of what was to become a major capital city guaranteed their families wealth and prestige for a century to come. These contractors, in fact, became Delhi’s new aristocracy.

They were a very different group of people from the effete aristocrats of Shahjahanabad’s twilight. Mostly they were Sikh businessmen from Punjab, men of the world who had made their money in diverse ways — as feudal agriculturalists, as traders, as bandits — and if they muscled in on the British bonanza at all it was because they were masters of that activity which has defined Delhi’s business elite ever since: securing contracts. They were brawny, monumental characters who loved political hustle, and their descendants still speak with awe of the entrepreneurial audacity through which their dynasties were made. The grandson of Ranjit Singh, who built such structures as the Council House, now called the Parliament Building, and who owned Delhi’s lavish Imperial Hotel, recalls a figure wholly as enterprising as the British themselves.

“My grandfather’s next-door neighbour on Curzon Road was Sir Lala Shri Ram, the owner of Delhi Cloth Mills. Both men had the habit of taking tea on their lawns at six-thirty in the morning. One morning in 1932, Sir Lala rushed round to Ranjit’s house during the tea hour. His manner was unusually urgent. He was dressed in a three-piece suit and hat, carried a cane, and was followed by an assistant with a ledger book. ‘Have you seen the news, Singh?’ he cried.

“At that time, the British were trying to take the Asian sugar trade away from the Dutch, who supplied most of India’s sugar from Java, which was part of the Dutch East Indies. In 1932, the British launched an assault on Dutch sugar by imposing huge tariffs on its import into the empire. This created an immediate opportunity for anyone who could produce sugar in India. And, since the Javanese sugar industry would be immediately ruined, there would be Javanese sugar refineries to buy for a song.

“As Sir Lala told him all this, my grandfather quietly took notes. After their meeting he worked the numbers out for himself and saw that Sir Lala had spotted a real opportunity. That very day he wrote a letter to his brother-in-law, who lived a life of leisure on a feudal estate in Chamba, enclosing a credit note for 400,000 rupees.

“The brother-in-law took a train to Calcutta, and from there a steamer to Java. He visited four sugar refineries and chose the best. He had it taken apart, shipped in pieces to India, and erected in Luxor in the United Provinces. He supervised the whole process, until the refinery was entirely reassembled. Then he went back to reading literature on his estate. He had no interest in making sugar. He was just in it for the lark.

“Ranjit put his brother in charge of the business. It still runs today. I am a shareholder in it.

“I wish I had recorded him telling this story on camera. Because for him it was so simple. There was nothing extraordinary about it at all. Just go to Java, buy the thing and bring it back. He was incredible.

“But he always maintained a simple lifestyle. He only kept one Jaguar. He never bought himself a plane or anything like that. He had the best suits from Savile Row but in his behaviour he was very down-to-earth. He had left behind a feudal environment, and he knew how easy it would be to fall back into it. One of his cousins in Punjab had 12,000 acres of land and a fleet of Rolls-Royces; he saw that entire fortune disappear in a couple of generations. Those feudal landlords lived in a bubble: the only things they cared about were money, cars, champagne and hunting. I can have a four-hour conversation with those men about weapons.

“That was Ranjit’s nightmare. He always told everyone in his family that they had to study and work: ‘If you don’t have a profession you’ll become feudal and lose everything.’ And it happened. There were family members who sold priceless properties and blew everything on parties. One cousin had a continual party for thirty years.”

From this final recollection we understand well how the fortunes of Delhi’s original contractors have diverged so greatly over the years. Some of their descendants still reign over Delhi life from their estates in the city’s centre. Others have faded away. Property has been divided up and sold. A quantity of energy goes into internecine legal battles over what remains. Land has simply disappeared, great tracts that were occupied and built on by others over the years, the title deeds lost to time, the energy for contestation lost. Many of these people now live straitened lives in wings of divided mansions, maintaining their status with occasional outings of the silver tea service and a haughty disdain for the new money that has replaced their old. Their faces are lined with the burden of family suicides, madness and alcoholism. They have eccentric paranoia about the past, hiding their whisky from the portrait on the wall of their magisterial great-grandfather, Sir something-or-other, who built the house in which now they skulk.

Houses under legal dispute cannot be sold, and they are too expensive to maintain. Mansions lie empty around Connaught Place, their electricity long cut off, attended only by retainers who clean and guard their somnolent grounds. Far from the hurtling pulse of the city — which nonetheless is only on the other side of the wall — these people live desultorily in 30-million-dollar properties, occasionally sweeping the lawn of leaves, and cooking on a wood fire. They prise apart the bars of the rusted gates to make a way out into the street, but they almost never leave. They sleep in the sun. Sometimes they raise their heads to throw futile stones at a trespassing dog, which is as sleepy as they. They watch their children play in the sprawling, ramshackle grounds. They sleep some more. They watch their children’s children, in turn, playing in the grounds.

• • •

If the new aristocrats were a departure from the old, their arrival in British Delhi represented a significant departure, also, in their own lives. Their ability to continue getting contracts depended on their successful integration into the new world of British society, and integrate they did, leaving behind what they had previously been.

They had grown up, for instance, in houses built in the courtyard style that had come to north India from central Asia. The empty space of these courtyard houses was not at the edges but in the centre, where there was an open courtyard, often with trees and fountains, which provided a common area for the entire, extended family. Around the courtyard was the house, with private lodgings for different branches of the family, and sometimes separate day quarters for the family’s women. It was an attractive style which still appears in the dreams of some of Delhi’s elders, who were born in such houses but have lived nearly all their subsequent lives in dwellings turned inside-out. But in the 1920s, having to receive the British at their homes, Delhi’s contractors put Asiatic accommodation unsentimentally behind them to build lawn-skirted mansions with large drawing rooms where men and women could consort, unsegregated ‘à l’anglaise’.

The rewards of Anglicisation were great. The British, concerned to cultivate this new aristocracy, awarded them not only business contracts but also knighthoods and other state honours. They gave them membership of their clubs and helped them send their sons to Oxford and Cambridge. And so a new ruling class emerged which rapidly took on Englishness. They internalised the codes of English dress. They played tennis and golf, and went hunting at the weekend. They had picnics on blankets and high tea on polished silver.

But their success depended above all on their ability to re-invent their language. The son of one of the building contractors writes:

My father, Sobha Singh… was way ahead of his times. He sensed that if he had to get on with the English, he must know their language. He advertised for a tutor… Within three or four years, he was able to speak the language fluently. He tried to get my mother to pick up English too. He hired an Anglo-Indian lady, Mrs Wright, to teach her. After months of slogging at it, my mother picked up a few words: good morning, good evening, good night and thank you. And she used to make fun of herself and converted the thank you to ‘thankus very muchus’. Trying to train her how to mix with the English was a near disaster… He gave up the battle to Anglicise her.

My father was a six-footer and slimly built. My mother barely five feet tall. He was very particular about his attire. He wore English suits: coat and striped trousers, bow tie or silk ties and dinner jackets. I never saw him in shervanis and chooridars. The only Indian thing he wore was a tehmat when he retired for the night. He loved to eat and drink well: a huge breakfast of cornflakes, eggs, toast and fruit; a couple of gins and tonic before lunch which was also substantial; tea included cakes or pastry; he liked a couple of Scotches before dinner which was again an elaborate multiple-dish affair followed by a cognac or two.²²

The culture these people had grown up with was the joint Hindu and Muslim culture of north India, which, as we have seen, gave pride of place to fine language. Most of them had grown up speaking and writing several of the related languages of this region: Urdu, which was written in the Arabic script; Hindustani, which was pretty much identical but written in the Sanskrit-derived Devanagari script; Punjabi, which was written in the Gurmukhi script, a cousin of Devanagari — and possibly one or two of several other local tongues. Nor was language, even for businessmen such as they, merely a tool to get things done. They were lovers of poetry and song, and many of them wrote poetry themselves — usually in Urdu which, though it might not have been their first language, was generally considered the best language for poetry. Suddenly, however, they led their lives in their weakest language of all, or one they did not even know: English. They barked at each other in the clubby argot of the British bureaucrats and military men with whom they fraternised (“six-footer”) and their previous culture dwindled within them. English took over, and though they passed on fabulous estates to their descendants they could not pass on their own tongues.

• • •

When you look at photographs of the newly completed British administrative complex, enormous and pristinely modern, and surrounded by miles and miles of nothing, you cannot help feeling there is something delusional about it — as there had been about many other cities built in this place. And indeed, in this sense, the British were entirely traditional Delhi rulers. They were forced to abandon their capital — in less time, in their case, than it had taken to build. In 1947, they hastily moved out, and the administrators of independent India moved in.

Unwittingly or not, these administrators finished what the British had begun: the destruction of north India’s ancient shared Hindu and Muslim culture. In agony after the mutilations of Partition, the new state was determined to eradicate all reminders of its wounds. The shared culture would be forgotten, and its traces of Islam stamped out. Language was an essential sphere of operations.

The 1950 constitution set out as an explicit objective the propagation of a new language, ‘Hindi’. Hindi was a re-invention of traditional Hindustani — the north Indian language of which Urdu, since it had been taken to the highest levels of literary and philosophical exploration, was the most sophisticated version — which would be fabricated by expunging, to the greatest extent possible, all influences of Persian, Arabic and Turkish and by replacing them with words retrieved or coined from Sanskrit. Indian tongues, henceforth, would not produce Muslim sounds. Nor would Indian hands shape Muslim letters: the writing of this language in the Arabic script was discontinued, and Hindi was only written in Devanagari, a script indigenous to India. The Central Hindi Directorate was set up to patrol the back lanes of this language and police its borders. Official communiqués — school textbooks, for instance, or news reports on All India Radio — were manufactured as showpieces of the new language: awkward, academic showpieces whose Sanskritic excess resembled no real person’s speech.

Perhaps one imagines that an independent country is more vocal than one colonised. Perhaps one imagines independence as a moment when previously silent voices burst forth with conversation and song. But in north India the truth was more complex. People no longer read the works of Hindustani’s greatest exponents, which contained too many unapproved elements and which were written in an alphabet which they could very soon no longer decipher. Punjabi households, previously so proudly literary, began to dislike books themselves. Most books, books that did not directly further one’s career, represented an expense without return. They represented, in fact, a threat to the post-Partition household, in which rebuilding the family’s material base was the only legitimate preoccupation: esoteric concerns and fictional worlds were now considered a dangerous influence from which parents should preserve their children. In the new, fearful, ethos of the family, moreover, parents felt uneasy about the self-sufficiency of a child with a book: they wanted their children to need them as they needed their children, and they shut off avenues to solitude and reverie.

Delhi upheld its reputation as a city where languages came to die: for not only did Partition refugees forget Urdu in one generation, they even had difficulty passing on their mother tongue of Punjabi, which few of their grandchildren knew except in snatches. Many members of its middle classes ended up speaking no language well — neither English, which was increasingly, nonetheless, the language of professional life, nor Hindi, which they spoke at home but in which they had little vocabulary outside the needs of the everyday. The care of language was seen as worthless and effeminate, and a certain vagueness of speech, a deliberate ignorance of grammar, became the style. Books and newspapers were full of errors of spelling and grammar, to say nothing of advertisements and street signs. It became difficult to find people to translate between Indian languages; for a high-level command of, say, literary English and literary Hindi, was hardly ever united in the same person. The old broadness of outlook died out. People knew less and less what people who were not like them thought about, and classes and castes became more isolated and suspicious.

It was often poor migrants from the small towns who preserved the idea of beautiful speech. The landed Partition refugees counted their houses and saved-up money, and they rejoiced in their superiority to these ragged, later arrivals; but sometimes they heard the speech of the working classes, who had come in from other places where the poetic, ecstatic elements of Hindustani had not become foreign — and they realised how inarticulate they themselves had become.

Perhaps the love for poetry and fine language, which now had no object, was transferred to Bombay cinema, which enjoyed cultish adoration in the decades following Partition. It was to the Bombay film studios that many of the migrant Urdu poets and playwrights then headed, and there they created a cinema of delicate feeling in which heroes spoke in exquisite, Persianate Hindi and sang love songs whose metaphors recalled the heights of Urdu poetry. The three male superstars of the era, Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand, all arrived in Bombay from what is now Pakistan, and, if Hindi cinema from the 1950s and ’60s still carries such emotional charge, even among people who were born long after it, it is because it remained a last refuge of romantic, poetic aspects of Hindustani culture that were largely driven underground by the severer ethos of the independent nation. Significantly, perhaps, Bombay cinema was one of the few domains of Indian public life where Muslim men were unabashedly adored — even though they donned Hindu stage names.

It is instructive that this cinema also had cult appeal across the entire Soviet Bloc, where audiences were governed by other mirthless regimes and where, moreover, they had in the 1930s and ’40s lived through mass traumas of their own. For it was a cinema that existed slightly outside the everyday world, a cinema that operated as if the previous things, the finer things, endured (its stories were almost entirely silent about Partition, for instance, as if it had not been born from that throe). It was of extraordinary poignancy to people, wherever they might be, for whom those things had been lost.

• • •

Defence Colony is one of south Delhi’s leafiest and most desirable neighbourhoods. Its spacious plots were given out in the years following Indian independence to officers in the armed services. The original inhabitants are now elderly and lead lives of archaic rhythms: brisk walks in Defence Colony’s many parks at six in the morning — sometimes accompanied by sessions of energetic clapping or synchronised group laughter — followed by breakfast and the newspaper on the balcony at seven. Lunch and dog walks are coordinated by the ‘boys’ who work in the house, the sons and grandsons, often, of servants known and trusted from army days. Tea and biscuits arrive on the terrace with military regularity in the afternoon. Dinner and bed happen early for these five o’clock risers, but there may be time for an evening drink at the local club, where reminiscences are shared about the escapades of yore. They will talk about military college in the 1940s, before Partition split the army, too, into India and Pakistan. Half their college mates became the enemy at that point, and they fought them in three major wars, but this did not impede ancient affections (which sometimes even included surreptitious cooperation across the lines: “Hold off on such-and-such target, old boy: my sister’s son is holed up there”) and still now they preserve friendships with their former colleagues on the other side of the border. They talk of long-gone whisky-quaffing superiors with Wodehousian nicknames.

They are sturdy men and women with a powerful sense, both, of duty and pleasure. “When there wasn’t a war on,” one of the aged — but immaculate and beautiful — military wives said to me once, her accent Sandhurst, her glass full of gin-and-tonic, “it was the best life you could imagine. All of us together on a military base, drinks and billiards in the evening, and lots of tall men in uniform… ”

Frugal people with comfortable homes and respectable pensions, there was nothing particularly wanting in these people’s lives. They enjoyed social prestige and connections, their children were well educated, well married and well employed. Unexpectedly, however, in their old age, they surpassed adequacy, and became rich.

In the property boom of the early 2000s, the plots they were living on reached values of $2 million, then $3 million, then $4 million. These numbers were gossiped around the neighbourhood. Few of them really wanted a change in their lives, but there was pressure to release this value, often from their children, who were in the prime of their careers. The old-timers moved out and rented elsewhere as, one by one, the houses came down. They were idiosyncratic houses, often designed by the owners, but they had some grace and proportion: large, high-ceilinged rooms, roof terraces for the winter sun, and airy ground-floor rooms for the summer, well shaded by gardens of trees. Over a short period of time most of them were reduced to rubble, and Defence Colony rows became gap-toothed. Shacks came up in the holes, to house builders and their families: dark-skinned country children played in the streets by day, while at night melancholic songs could be heard as the women roasted rotis on wood fires. As the buildings rose, the labourers’ accommodation rapidly improved: soon they lived in five-star apartments, their laundry strung merrily across marble halls, even their songs more joyful. And then the work was complete and these families went somewhere else to live in tents again.

The new buildings were very different from the old: great fortresses of international-style apartments. There were no more gardens, which would have been an impossible sacrifice of real estate; there were no more open-air verandas, sun-deflecting white-washed walls, shading trees, or any other signs of the architectural intelligence that had previously accumulated, over many centuries, in this harsh-seasoned place. These new colossi towered over the trees, their stone faces grimly to the sun, the greenhouse effect of their floor-to-ceiling windows off-set by great batteries of air conditioners. High walls, security keypads and CCTV cameras completed the promise of ‘international living’.

The original owners retained a couple of apartments in these blocks for themselves and their children. The others they sold for $1 million each.

All this explains why, as I approach the house of Colonel Oberoi, the street is like a building site. The dust of demolition and construction powders the tongue. The air screams with the roar of masonry saws on Italian marble (the epithet, in fact, is unnecessary: all marble here is Italian, wherever it comes from). In front of one of the houses, a team operates a specialised drill for sinking still deeper the illegal private wells that all these houses use to bypass the rationing of the municipal water supply: as the water table runs dry, these wells, which until recently ran fifty feet below the surface, must now sink to 200 feet. The companies who possess the expertise and equipment to drill to those depths have more work than they can handle.

I am late for Colonel Oberoi, and my apologetic telephone call from the car did nothing to appease him. “I will give you five minutes to get here,” he growled down the phone.

Colonel Oberoi’s house has not been knocked down. It is one of the rare original houses still to be standing. Colonel Oberoi designed it himself, and it is highly eccentric: an attempt to fit an old-style courtyard design into a New Delhi row-house plot.

“My mother insisted on a courtyard,” he says, “when we built this in the fifties.”

For a house that has been occupied for more than fifty years, there is an astonishing lack of stuff. The walls are bare, as are the light bulbs. On the sideboard are several photos of grandchildren and military award ceremonies.

The Colonel is over ninety and has been retired for decades. He is slightly deaf, so his military bark is even more stentorian. He wears a rumpled safari suit — the uniform, in earlier times, of Indian public servants. He sits down at a writing desk on which there are notes written in Urdu in notebooks that he has made himself by recycling the blank sides of A4 printed pages: the pages are cut into four and stapled together at the spine. He gestures to me to sit across the desk from him.

“In the villages where I grew up,” he says, “the houses all had courtyards. You entered from the street into the courtyard, where there would be cattle and hay, and beds for sleeping outside. The rooms were in a line along the far end of the courtyard: they were all on the ground floor, and built of mud and wooden beams. The roof jutted far out over the edge of the building so that the rooms were always in shade. All these rooms were bedrooms: the living area was the courtyard. If people came to visit, there would be tea in the courtyard around a table. We didn’t host grand events at home — for weddings and religious events there was a community centre which we all helped to build and maintain.”

Colonel Oberoi grew up in a tribal district of North-West Frontier Province, a place of extraordinary natural beauty where the peaks of the Himalayas are always within sight and the Indus river is at its proudest and most lush. In August 1947, this region became part of Pakistan, and Colonel Oberoi’s family became Partition refugees.

“At that time I was posted in Bombay for military training. My family was stuck in Mardan, near the Khyber Pass, and they couldn’t set out for India because my wife was pregnant. They were looked after by a Muslim colleague of mine, a Captain Jabbar who hosted them in his military accommodation and made sure they were safe: my sister and her husband, two cousins and their children, and my aunt and mother. The news coming out of those places was terrible and I was very concerned. Two weeks after Independence I went to the evacuee organisation in Amritsar. Friends of mine who had family in Lahore were given military escorts to cross the border and fetch them, but Mardan was too far away for that. I was very worried and didn’t know what to do. Finally they made provision to airlift my family out. I still remember the moment when the announcement came over the loudspeakers: ‘Lieutenant Oberoi’s family will be airlifted out.’

“But my family was not ready to be airlifted. My wife couldn’t move. So she had to wait until our eldest son was born, which didn’t happen till October. By that time it was too late for the airlift. So Captain Jabbar personally escorted them to Peshawar, where he handed them over to the care of a Major from Haryana, who brought my family over the border in a regimental train. Delhi was chaos at that time — all the trains had been stopped. I could not get to Delhi and nor could they. It took another month before we were finally reunited.”

As he talks, Colonel Oberoi draws extensively. Plans of houses, maps of family movements.

“I wasn’t based in Delhi in those years: I was moving everywhere with the army. In 1949 I was sent to England on a long gunnery staff course. After that, I was posted all over India. But I had no accommodation of my own, which was a big problem. My extended family was still staying in a one-room house with a relative in Delhi. Delhi was full of refugees: a couple of hundred thousand people were still living under tents and thatched roofs in the various camps while the government tried to find housing for them. A colleague of mine told me to ask about evacuee property. They showed me a house that had been abandoned by a Muslim family and I went to the resettlement director to ask if it could be allotted to me. He said I was ineligible because I was posted outside Delhi. ‘But we are building a defence colony,’ he said, ‘where you might qualify for a plot.’”

The authorities made it easy for army men to buy these plots by offering instalment plans over several years. In the post-Independence conception of Delhi, it was to be a city of high-minded people committed to the national cause, and the choicest of the new ‘colonies’ that sprouted quickly on all sides of the British bureaucratic city designed by Lutyens were given over to people from outside the government whose work was essential to the nation: in addition to Defence Colony there were neighbourhoods reserved for journalists, lawyers and the like. Businesspeople, by contrast, whose activities were considered more vulgar and self-serving, were housed in the comparatively remote neighbourhoods of west Delhi.

“I sat down and wrote a petition letter. The next day they called and told me that my application had been successful. I bought the plot. When I came back to Delhi, we built this house.”

I have come to see Colonel Oberoi to look around his courtyard house built, anachronistically, in the new city, but he wishes to end our meeting at the time we agreed — in spite of the fact that I turned up late and missed half of it — so there is no time for the tour. It is time for his walk to the market. We stand up.

I ask him what he is writing in his notebooks.

“This is my poetry,” he says.

“You write in Urdu?”

“I write in many languages. My mother tongue was Saraiki, a dialect of Punjabi spoken in the place I was born. I used to play with boys from the tribes who spoke Pashto. As a boy in the 1920s I spoke six languages every day: Saraiki, Punjabi, Hindi, Pashto, English and Urdu. I used to write letters in three languages using three different scripts: Hindi to my mother and sister, English to my friends, and Urdu to my uncles. I write English poetry too. But Urdu is the best language for poetry.”

With the mention of poetry, Colonel Oberoi forgets his haste to leave. He wants to read to me. He goes to the bookshelf to get a stack of notebooks full of poetry.

“I have been writing poetry for seventy years,” he says.

Much of it has been composed in old, unused diaries. He flicks through them, looking for the poems he wishes to read. There is something touching about these volumes, whose days and months are printed in grey English from left to right and from what readers of the Latin script consider front to back, and which are filled with hand-written poetry written the other way — the poetry cutting backwards through the days. He reads in a deep and musical voice, pausing after each poem. They are odd verses which give expression to unusual curiosities. “All the emotions we feel for other human beings, do they have any place in paradise? For if there is nothing to bind us together there, it is no paradise to me.”

Jaise nadee ke bahaav main ek pathroon ka jaloos hai

Bahe jaa rahe hain ludak ludak

Wajood use na thahraav hai

Na lagaav hai na dosti hai

Na hai dushmanee

Chaahat nahin, nafrat nahin

Jannat hai uska naam agar jannat hamein nahin chahiye.

Like the march of stones

Tossing and tumbling in the current of a river

Without identity or roots

Without attachments of friendship

Or of enmity

No desire, no hatred —

If that’s what you call heaven

I want none of it.²³

Severe and regimented in his general dealings, something tender and mellifluous emerges from Colonel Oberoi in our conversation about poetry. It comes, in part, from the memory of stupendous nature in the mind of this man who has lived so long in what has become one of the world’s largest conurbations. But his Urdu poetry asserts also his allegiance to a lost culture, one that Hindus like him once shared with Muslims, a cosmopolitan, multilingual culture in which poetry and the life of the spirit found more ample expression.

“How did you feel about Partition?” I ask, after the recitation.

“In the initial stages I felt very bitter. I mean, we were hoping for independence and what did we get? A country cut in half.”

And he elaborates with a domestic metaphor that will return again and again.

“Two brothers ended up fighting and dividing the plot.”

His bitterness finds its target in the politicians who oversaw the division of British India.

“We in the services had a code of behaviour. The welfare of the people and the country comes first, your own, last. This oath was emblazoned on the walls of our military academy. But politicians did not live like that. They thought of their own interests, and hang the country.”

“Did you feel bitter towards Muslims?”

“Why would I? I had grown up with those people, and they were caught in the same situation that we were. The younger generation was taught to hate Muslims. That kinship we had is not there now: they grew up hearing horror stories. But we love those people.”

He strokes his bushy white moustache and says, “Can I offer you some tea?”