before I began to realize quite how many of the people I met every day were Partition refugees. Even the most well-established Delhi figures—newspaper editors, successful businessmen, powerful politicians—had tales to tell of childhoods broken in two, of long journeys on foot over the Punjab plains, of houses left behind, of sisters kidnapped or raped: the ghastly but familiar litany of Partition horrors.
The Puris’ story was fairly typical. Before Partition they had a large town house in Lahore. When the riots came they packed a couple of suitcases, bought their bullock cart and headed off towards Delhi. Their possessions they left locked up in the haveli, guarded by Muslim servants. Like the Palestinians a year later, they expected to come back within a few months when peace had been restored. Like the Palestinians, they never returned.
On arrival in Delhi they found a gutted house in Subzi Mandi, the vegetable bazaar of the Old City. It had belonged to a Muslim family that had fled weeks before. The Puris simply installed a new door and moved in. There were still killings, and occasionally stray bullets ricocheted around the bazaar, but gradually the Puris began to find their feet.
‘We acquired slowly by slowly,’ Mrs Puri remembers. ‘My husband started a business making and selling small houses. I knitted woollens. At first it was very hard.’
After a year of carrying water in leaky buckets, the house was connected to the water mains; later the Puris got electricity installed. By 1949 they had a fan; by 1956 a fridge. In the late 1960s the Puris moved to a smart new house in South Extension. They had arrived.
We heard the same story repeated over and over again. Even the most innocuous of our neighbours, we discovered, had extraordinary tales of 1947: chartered accountants could tell tales of single-handedly fighting off baying mobs; men from grey government ministries would emerge as the heroes of bloody street battles. Everything these people now possessed was built up by their own hard labour over the last few years.
Mr Seth, our next door neighbour, was a retired official in the Indian Railways. A safari-suited civil servant, he was polite, timid and anonymous. After passing out of Walton Railway Training School, Seth’s first posting came in 1946: he was made Assistant Ticket Inspector at Sheikhapura near Lahore. One year later there came the great divide and Mr Seth, a Hindu, found himself on the wrong side of the border. The killing had started. Sikhs and Hindus stopped trains carrying refugees to Pakistan and killed all the Muslims. Muslims stopped trains going to India and killed all the Sikhs and Hindus.
‘Every train from India that passed our station was totally smashed,’ remembers Mr Seth. ‘Women, children, old, young: all were killed. Blood was pouring from the bogies [carriages].’
Then one day, a refugee train from Rawalpindi under the custody of the Gurkhas passed through Sheikhapura. Nervous of being attacked by Muslims, the Gurkhas—all Hindus—let off a barrage of shots through the train windows. A stray bullet hit the wife of the Muslim station master. The station master, unhinged with grief, tried to shoot the only Hindu in the station—his Assistant Ticket Inspector, Mr Seth. He missed. But Mr Seth realized that the moment had come to flee Pakistan. He jumped off the platform and ran down the line towards India. There, a little later, he was ambushed by a party of Muslims heading in the opposite direction. They took everything he owned, including his shoes, his shirt and his trousers.
‘I travelled barefoot down the lines having only a knicker,’ said Mr Seth. ‘Four times I escaped death. Four times! I arrived at Amritsar station at midnight, and got a new uniform from the station master. The next day I reported for duty at nine a.m. exactly.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Promotion!’ said Mr Seth, beaming a red betel-nut smile. ‘I became Commercial Accountant bracket Parcel Clerk, Booking Clerk, Goods Clerk etcetera unbracket. Later I was transferred to Delhi and was given a temporary house in Lodhi Colony. It was previously owned by a Muslim. I was told he had been shot dead on the veranda.’
The violence totally gutted many of the poorer parts of Delhi, but even the very richest districts were affected. While shoppers looked on, Hindu mobs looted the smart Muslim tailors and boutiques in Connaught Place; passers-by then stepped over the murdered shopkeepers and helped themselves to the unguarded stocks of lipstick, handbags and bottles of face cream. In Lodhi Colony, Sikh bands burst into the white Lutyens bungalows belonging to senior Muslim civil servants and slaughtered anyone they found at home.
In some areas of the Old City, particularly around Turkman Gate and the Jama Masjid, the Muslims armed themselves with mortars and heavy machine guns. From their strongpoints in the narrow alleyways they defied not only the rioters but also the Indian Army. Many of the Muslim families who remain in Delhi today survived by barricading themselves into these heavily defended warrens.
Meanwhile, refugees poured into India: ‘300,000 Sikh and Hindu refugees are currently moving into the country,’ stated one small page three report in a 1947 edition of the Hindustan Times. ‘Near Amritsar 150,000 people are spread 60 miles along the road. It is perhaps the greatest caravan in human history.’ It was this steady stream of Punjabi refugees who, despite the great exodus of Muslims, still managed to swell the capital’s population from 918,000 in 1941 to 1,800,000 in 1951. The newspaper stories were illustrated with pictures showing the dead lying like a thick carpet on New Delhi Railway Station. Other photographs depicted the refugee camps on the ridge, the white tent cities in which Punjab Singh had stayed on his arrival. There were also shots of some fire-blackened and gutted houses standing in the rubble of the Subzi Mandi. It was in a house such as this that Mr and Mrs Puri had taken shelter for their first months in their new city.
The more I read, the more it became clear that the events of 1947 were the key to understanding modern Delhi. The reports highlighted the city’s central paradox: that Delhi, one of the oldest towns in the world, was inhabited by a population most of whose roots in the ancient city soil stretched back only forty years. This explained why Delhi, the grandest of grand old aristocratic dowagers, tended to behave today like a nouveau-riche heiress: all show and vulgarity and conspicuous consumption. It was a style most unbecoming for a lady of her age and lineage; moreover it jarred with everything one knew about her sophistication and culture.
This paradox also exposed the principal tensions in the city. The old Urdu-speaking élite who had inhabited Delhi for centuries—both Hindu and Muslim—had traditionally looked down on the Punjabis as boorish yeoman farmers. With their folk memories of the mushairas (levees) of the old Mughal court and the mehfils (literary evenings) of the great Delhi poets, with their pride in the subtlety and perfection of Delhi Urdu and Delhi cooking, they could never reconcile themselves to the hardworking but (in their eyes) essentially uncivilized Punjabi colonizers. It was as if Bloomsbury were made to absorb a deluge of mud-booted Yorkshire farmers. To these people, of course, Mrs Puri’s finishing school was the ultimate presumption: a Punjabi immigrant using western textbooks to teach etiquette to Delhi-wallahs—and this in a city which for centuries had regarded itself as the last word in refinement and courtly behaviour.
In their turn, the Punjabis despised the old Delhi-wallahs as effeminate, slothful and degenerate: ‘Maybe these Delhi people are not always lazy,’ Punjab Singh once said to me. ‘But they are not too active either. Punjabi people are good at earning money and also at spending it. They enjoy life. Delhi peoples are greedy and mean. They expect to live well, but never they are working for it.’
Today the two worlds, Mughal Old Delhi and Punjabi New Delhi, mix but rarely. Each keeps to itself, each absolutely certain of its superiority over the other. Even on common festivals such as Dusshera, in Delhi traditionally celebrated by the Hindu and Muslim communities without distinction, entirely separate ceremonies are now held, one set around the Red Fort and the Ram Lila Grounds of Old Delhi, the other in the parks and gardens of Punjabi residential colonies south of Lutyens’s city.
Despite
