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Literary Review
Capital talk
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While the constituent individual books have all been published before, The Delhi Omnibus, covering all the major themes, is a convenient ready-reckoner, says R. KRITHIKA.
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NONE of the books in Oxford University Press's The Delhi Omnibus is new. Percival Spear's Delhi: A Historical Sketch and Twilight of the Mughals were published between 1945-1950, Narayani Gupta's Delhi Between the Two Empires 1803-1931 in 1981 and R.E. Frykenberg's Delhi Through the Ages in 1986. But the junta looking for dope on India's capital city will find this one useful. Politics, socio-economic changes, urban growth and administration and cultural trends — all the major lines are covered.
A quick recap of what's between the covers:
As the name implies, Spear's Delhi: A Historical Sketch traces the growth of Delhi into a power centre under the British till it was recognised as the capital at the Delhi Durbar of 1911. Vivid word pictures take the reader through ancient Delhi's provincial past under the Mauryas and the Guptas and its rise to fame under Prithvi Raj. With the reign of the later, Delhi emerged from legend into historical fact. Then followed the long rule of the Sultanate, the Mughals and then their decline. For a while, Delhi's ascendance was curtailed but again after the mutiny, it became clear that locating the capital at Delhi was of strategic importance since it was in the direct line of communication with the ever-important Punjab and Rajasthan.
A general reading of school textbooks would convince one that after Aurangazeb, the Mughal rulers were all weak, effete and full of vices. Barring a blind Shah Alam here and a Muhammed Shah Rangila there, there is hardly any mention of the emperor. Twilight of the Mughals changes this impression. Spear's sympathetic portrait shows the later Mughals instead to be men of learning and culture (with odd exceptions) trying to do the best they could given the circumstances they were living under. His painstaking research also shows how the East India Company's attitude to the Mughals changed as its power increased — from regarding the Mughal emperor as an equal to Bahadur Shah's final ignominious exile to Rangoon.
Narayani Gupta's Delhi Between Two Empires treads much the same ground as Spear does in Twilight ... but goes on to look at civil life and urban growth till independence. She traces Delhi's growth from city to province to finally centre of the nation, first recovering from the 1857 Mutiny, the changing public opinion, the growth of local government and the pressures of urban expansion. Gupta also outlines the decreasing sense of community between the Hindus and Muslims, aided by the British tendency to think in stereotypes of the two groups as separate and antagonistic communities. "The civilised cultured community with non-competing and mutually respecting elites" slowly declines first with the 1857 Revolt and then the 1911 proclamation of Delhi as the new capital.
Of course there is much more to Delhi than the political elite, urban government and politics. The essays in R.E. Frykenburg's (ed.) Delhi Through the Ages reflect the socio-cultural life in Delhi through the 19th and early 20th Centuries. This book is a collection of papers presented at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1979 at a seminar-workshop held in honour of Percival Spear. The settlement of Delhi, especially during the reign of the early Sultanate (M. Athar Ali), a detailed exploration of Shajahanabad (Hamida Khatoon Naqvi and Stephen P. Blake) and Herbert Baker's contribution in building the capital (Thomas Metcalf) are essays that focus on the city's growth. Bruce B. Lawrence's essay on the Chistiya movement and Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya has a fascinating discussion on the distinction between the Prophet and a saint while the paper on Ahmed Shah Dehlavi looks at the educational reforms in Muslim society.
But this is not a book that can be read at one go; take your time over it. It's definitely one for the hardcore Delhi fan.
Delhi: A Historical Sketch, Percival Spear; Twilight of the Mughals, Percival Spear; Delhi Between the Two Empires (1803-1931), Narayani Gupta; Delhi Through the Ages, R.E. Frykenberg; Oxford University Press, Rs. 595.
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