as Balvinder and Sandhu could witness, when provoked the inhabitants of this mild town could rise up and commit acts of extreme brutality. Men would avert their eyes as next door neighbours were burned alive or disembowelled. The same people who would invite you to share their last plate of food could, with equal spontaneity, lose control and run amok. Then, with equal ease they could return to their bazaars and shops, factories and offices and carry on as if nothing had happened. It was difficult to understand.
Moreover, despite Delhi’s historic reputation as the most cultured town in India, the city’s history was punctuated with many such flashes of terrible, orgiastic violence. It was not just invaders who put the people of Delhi to the sword. During the Middle Ages and throughout the long Mughal twilight the town was continually rent with bloody riots, even small civil wars. Out of the first twelve Sultans, only two died peacefully in their beds; the rest were killed, usually in a horrible manner and almost always by their courtiers or subjects. Invaders like Timur the Lame were able to storm the high walls of the city only because the inhabitants were already busy cutting each others’ throats. The death toll from bazaar disputes such as the eighteenth-century Shoe Sellers’ Riot could run into tens of thousands.
The last great conflagration was Partition. In the dying days of the British Raj, when the subcontinent was split into Muslim-only Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, twelve million people were made refugees. Hordes of non-Muslims—Sikhs and Hindus—fled their ancestral villages in Pakistan; India’s displaced Muslims struck out in the opposite direction. It was the greatest migration the modern world had ever seen. Yet again Delhi was consigned to the flames. Following some of the worst rioting in its history, nearly half of its ancient Muslim population—the descendants of the people who had erected the Qutab Minar and lined the streets to cheer the Great Mogul—packed their bags and headed off to a new country. Their place was taken by refugees from the Western Punjab, among them Mr and Mrs Puri and Punjab Singh. Delhi was transformed from a small administrative capital of 900,000 people to a Punjabi-speaking metropolis half the size of London.
Of the two peoples who had ruled Delhi during the previous thousand years, the British disappeared completely while the Indian Muslims were reduced to an impoverished minority. In the space of a few months, the face of the city was probably changed more radically than at any other time since the Muslims first came to India, a millennium before.
‘OUR VILLAGE was famous for its sweets,’ said Punjab Singh. ‘People would come for miles to taste the jalebis our sweet-wallahs prepared. There were none better in the whole of the Punjab.’
We were sitting on a charpoy at International Backside Taxi Stand. For weeks I had been begging Balvinder’s father to tell me the story of how he had come to Delhi in 1947. A stern and sombre man, Punjab would always knit his eyebrows and change the subject. It was as if Partition were a closed subject, something embarrassing that shouldn’t be raised in polite conversation.
It was only after a particularly persistent bout of badgering, in which Balvinder took my side, that Punjab had agreed to relent. But once started, he soon got into the swing of his story.
‘Samundra was a small and beautiful village in District Lyallpur,’ he said. ‘It was one of the most lovely parts of the whole of the Punjab. We had a good climate and very fertile land. The village stood within the ruins of an old fort and was surrounded on four sides by high walls. It was like this.’
With his hands, the old man built four castle walls. From the details that he sketched with his fingers you could see he remembered every bastion, every battlement, each loophole.
‘Our village was all Sikh apart from a few Hindu sweepers. Our neighbours were Mahommedan peoples. We owned most of the land but before 1947 we lived like brothers. There were no differences between us …’ Punjab stroked his beard. He smiled as he recalled his childhood.
‘On the 15th of August 1947 the Government announced Partition. We were not afraid. We had heard about the idea of Pakistan, but we thought it would make no difference to us. We realized a Mahommedan government would take over from the Britishers. But in our Punjab governments often come and go. Usually such things make no difference to the poor man in his village.
‘Then, quite suddenly, on the 10th of September, we got a message from the Deputy Commissioner in Lyallpur. It said: "You people cannot stay. You must leave your house and your village and go to India." Everyone was miserable but what could we do? All the villagers began loading their goods into bullock carts. The old men were especially sad: they had lived their whole lives in the village. But we were young and could not understand why our grandfathers were crying.
‘In the villages round about the Mahommedans heard we were being forced to move. Many came and said: "You must stay, do not go," but others were thinking dirty thoughts. They wanted to take our possessions.
‘At about six or seven o’clock on the morning we were due to leave, too many Muslim peoples—perhaps five or six thousand—suddenly appeared outside our fort, waving their swords and calling us dogs and infidels. The watchmen shut the gates. Inside, there were only nine hundred of us, including old women and childrens. We had no weapons. We thought we would be killed.
‘Then the Pradhan [head] of the Sweet-Makers said: "We have no guns but we have our pans and our sugar and our water. Let us make jalebis for our Muslim friends." Some of our people thought that the Sweet-Maker had gone mad, and they shook their heads and tore the bristles from their beards. They said: "This is crazy man. The Mahommedan peoples will not go away when they taste our delicious jalebis. Instead they will come inside and kill us." These old men were very sad and went off to the gurdwara to say their prayers.
‘But the Sweet-Maker took his assistants up on to the battlements and he built a big fire. He boiled the water in a pan and he added the sugar. He stirred the mixture until it was thick and flies were buzzing all around. He told the other mithai-wallahs to take their pans and to make jalebis over the other three gates. His assistants did as he said.
‘Down below, the Mahommedans had a tree trunk and were running with it against the great gates of the fort, but the gates still held. Eventually the mixture was ready, and the Pradhan shouted down: "You like our jalebis?" and he tilted his pan over the parapet. The boiling sugar poured over the wicked Muslims and they were all burned alive.’
Punjab beamed a bright smile: ‘All day and all night these dirty Mahommedans tried to find a way to enter the fort, but whenever they tried to get near the gates the sweet-makers gave them a taste of our celebrated jalebis. Then, some time about two a.m. the second night, our peoples saw headlights coming towards us across the fields. It was the British army. They had seen the fires of the sweet-makers burning on the battlements and had come to investigate. The convoy was led by an English colonel. He fired six shots into the air and the Mahommedan fellows ran off into the night as if their Shaitan [satan] was after them.
‘The next day the English colonel evacuated us in his trucks. We were only able to take one small bag each, and we had to leave all our carts and goats and sheep and buffalo and oxen. This made us very sad, but at least we were alive. The colonel took us to Amritsar and from there we caught the train to Delhi. Ah! To me Delhi was a wonderful town. I was amazed by all the beautiful cars in the streets. All the Mahommedan tonga-wallahs had gone to Pakistan, so I decided to become a taxi-wallah. This is the job I have been doing ever since.
‘After that day, for good luck, my brother Kulwinder began to make jalebis. He still has a shop in Begampur and I have heard some people say that he makes the best jalebis in all of Delhi …’
I
