Film Review: Jannat 2 is just bad, not badass

In the first scene of Jannat 2, a small-time crook is cornered by an angry creditor in an Old Delhi gali. The creditor pulls a gun on him, but our hero isn’t scared in the least. He takes one look at the weapon being aimed at him, dismisses its low quality in impressive detail, and before you know it, has managed to sell the man his own (far cooler) gun – making a neat getaway and a profit. Meet Sunil Dhariwal, alias Sonu Dilli, KKC. Um, yes, Kutti Kameeni Cheez.

As you can probably tell from that moniker plastered all over the promos, the makers of Jannat 2 have their hopes pinned on some generic idea of badass-ness, which they pray will be filled out by the figure of Emraan Hashmi in a leather jacket and a laid-on-thick Dilli accent.

Even more than its 2008 predecessor, Jannat 2 rides on the proven ability of its louche leading man to play the streetsmart fixer with a heart of gold. He may unzip his trousers as casually for paid sex as he does to go to the loo, but really, we know he’s just waiting for true love.

So that when he meets perfectly coiffed medico Jahnvi (played by Miss India Esha Gupta: “Yeh doctorni hai ya jadugarni?”), we’re not at all surprised that all his kutte-kameene life plans are swiftly abandoned for a vision of cosy domesticity “jahan nahaane ke baad towel bhi sahi jagah pe rakhna padta hai nahi toh daant padti hai”.

Unfortunately, the romance feels as fake as the doctorni herself. The overblown quality of the first encounter or two can be put down to Bollywood rules and thus even enjoyed. Sadly, though, our leading lady’s implausibly overdressed hospital avatar is only a prelude to the tacky georgette saris and cleavage-revealing bustiers in which she must henceforth appear, as if embalmed in some declasse version of an ancient Garden Vareli ad. And any desire to rescue her from this goongi gudiya state is scotched the moment she opens her mouth. (Though perhaps it is befitting that a heroine whose persona is more about Sonu Dilli’s fantasy than anything else should say such things as “Pata nahi mera dil aisa kyon keh raha hai ki tumhaare dil mein kucch hai jo tum keh nahi pa rahe ho”.)

Hashmi, in comparison, slips into his role with the enviable ease of one who’s done this before. Not even the overcooked dialogue – especially annoying in the voiceovers, where he’s talking to himself – can quite puncture our belief that he really is Sonu Dilli, hotheaded smooth talker extraordinaire, but eventually just a puny pawn in Delhi’s gun binness.

Or perhaps it’s just that he has a slightly more winsome role than poor Randeep Hooda, who’s saddled with playing a cop out to kill the gun binness because, er, a stray bullet killed his wife. Apart from beating up everyone in sight and mouthing as many ‘ch’ gaalis as he possibly can, he scowls and grimaces his way through the film, spending his time getting sodden drunk in the company of his sidekick (Brijendra Kala, with not much to do here) and listening to his dead wife’s voice on an answering machine tape a la Johnny Gaddar. (The filmmakers seem to recognize the implausibility of this life story, because they introduce it by having Kala narrate it to an acquaintance who keeps saying he must be joking.)

There’s nothing wrong with the plot as such, except that it’s thoroughly predictable and therefore thoroughly boring. Sharp execution could have saved the film from its mindnumbing fate – and very occasionally it does, as in a sequence shot deep in the bowels of the Nizamuddin dargah, in the passages that lead to the baoli. But the occasional high octane chase through a network of Sintex-tanki terraces, or the sight of guns being packed in a gleaming handicraft shop is drowned deep in a sea of genericness. Director Kunal Deshmukh seems tragically content to spend his time (and the producers’ money) wandering aimlessly from Qutb Minar to Hauz Khas and back in the vain hope of cashing in on an imagined ‘Delhi film’ tag.

The rest of the cast puts in a desperate effort to keep the ship afloat – Manish Choudhary as gunrunning kingpin Mangal Singh Tomar has a couple of moments, and Mohammad Zeeshan Ayub as Sonu’s best pal Balli is almost memorable – but Jannat 2 cannot be saved from sinking to the bottom.

One only hopes it won’t be rising to the surface as Jannat 3.

When What’s Queer Is Not

For nearly 30 years now, photographer Sunil Gupta has been searching for an Indian gay image



Towards the beginning of Sunil Gupta’s recently published book of photographs, Queer, are four black-and-white images entitled ‘Towards an Indian Gay Image, 1980-1983’. The first shows two men lying on a grassy knoll near Delhi’s Jamali-Kamali complex, one’s head half-buried in the other’s chest, their faces invisible. The next image, too, features a Delhi monument: Humayun’s Tomb. The man in front stands as if he owns the space—legs akimbo, jhola slung across shoulder, cigarette—but is cut off at the neck. The third has a man in shorts looking out over a courtyard. The fourth is of two men by a lake, two stones’ ripples beginning to form on its surface.

When I ask Gupta about the title, he laughs. They’re random images, he says. “We needed a name to give the section in the book,” he adds. Yet, as we turn the pages, he tells me the courtyard is of the Oberoi coffee shop in Delhi (“It was a spot, you know”) and the lake is Udaipur’s (“Those two didn’t know I was there.”). Humayun’s Tomb, it turns out, was a favourite hangout—“playground”, Gupta has called it—for the boy who grew up in Nizamuddin East. The Jamali Kamali image is the most carefully constructed: the tomb itself of a 16th century Sufi poet and his lover, the two men, and far away at the back (strategically arising from one man’s hip), is Delhi’s most obviously phallic monument—the Qutb Minar. It is a remarkable image, simultaneously iconic and playful, intimate and anonymous.

As the conversation comes to a close, it seems to me there’s nothing random about these pictures. They may not have been commissioned as such, but Gupta is doing in them just what the title says: searching for an Indian gay image. In fact, searching for that ever-elusive thing is what he’s been doing, unconsciously and consciously, for nearly 30 years.

Sunil Gupta was 16 when he left Delhi for Montreal. His parents—a UP Baniya father who’d served in the Army, a Tibetan mother educated in Indian boarding schools by her British foster-mother—had decided to emigrate to Canada. So in 1969, Gupta left a charmed Delhi childhood—wandering the city streets after school, watching countless films in Connaught Place, acting as his elder sister’s chaperone at the Cellar, the city’s first disco —for a new life in a cold city that his parents hadn’t quite registered was French-speaking.

By the time he entered Concordia University in 1972, Gupta had come out to his parents. Now he became active in gay groups on campus, campaigning against cruising as a capitalist form of sexuality that encouraged competing with buddies. “When you’re 18-19, you have these radical ideas,” Gupta smiles a half-mischievous smile. “We proposed picking up people collectively instead.”

He also began to take pictures.

Photography as a hobby had emerged earlier in Delhi, where he and his school friend Amit Jayaram used to get their respective sisters (Gupta had one, Jayaram three, including activist Aruna Roy) to pose, later developing the pictures in a bathroom. Now he and a literary gay friend collaborated on a photo narrative: Gupta took a series of pictures of five people they knew from Montreal’s gay bar scene, each accompanied by his friend’s text. Though he was studying accountancy, Gupta’s interest in photography and in documenting gay life had already started to come together. His Christopher Street photographs, taken over the summer of 1976, were influenced by the realist documentary work of Philippe Halsman and Lisette Model, with whom he took a photography class at the New School. It was seven years after the Stonewall riots of 1969: the gay scene in New York was at its performative peak. “I had never seen so many gay men in the middle of the day,” says Gupta. The confident strides and almost belligerent poses feel like a public declaration. The contrast is stark with the 1980-83 Delhi images, where backs are invariably turned to the camera, heads cut off, gestures tentative.

With ‘Exiles’ (1986), Gupta returned to gayness in Delhi, hoping to fill a gap in both Indian gay imagery and the (Western) art historical world. These remarkable colour images of gay men in iconic Delhi locations like India Gate, Jama Masjid, Lodi Garden, where they may in fact have met, were mostly anonymous. Some showed their faces, on condition that the work would not be shown in India. What added another layer were the captions: quotes from real conversations that Gupta recorded with gay men in Connaught Place. ‘Everyone is married. Mother wants me to get married. I probably will, there is the family name, and respect to consider,’ said one. ‘Even if you have a lover, you should get married and have children. Who would look after you in old age?’ said another.

“What struck me was the surety,” says Gupta. “Between puberty and 24, sexuality was play; women weren’t available, so you played with men. At 24, there was the certainty of marriage, then children.” He remembers the impossibility of talking about gayness in the 80s India. “It was a conversation stopper,” he grins. “Like saying ‘I just had sex five minutes ago’. People would say, ‘Really?’ and freeze.” To someone who knew of other possibilities, the atmosphere was repressive. Gupta returned to London, where he had moved, and gradually became involved in the emerging alternative arts scene.

His association with the Black Arts Movement, which challenged the UK art world’s exclusion of marginalised/diasporic communities, is barely discussed in the Indian media that has focused exclusively on his role at India’s ‘queer vanguard’. Since the early 2000s, Gupta has become one of India’s most public queer faces. But his association with Delhi’s queer community, not to mention its art scene—plagued as both are by socio-economic privilege and class exclusion (though also increasingly conscious of it)—has meant that his work is often seen as rarefied. One frequent talking point is the degree of nudity in Gupta’s images: some see it as gratuitous, intended-to-shock. Often, people respond to that aspect of a picture rather than to anything else. Why does he do it? Why, when asked for a self-portrait by Khoj, for example, does he send an image in which he sits thoughtfully in the foreground with two naked men kissing behind him? Gupta’s response is so matter-of-fact as to be non-explanatory. “I like to see how far I can go with images. So I sent them this.” Khoj took it. “It is apparently not acceptable here to show genitalia and/or breasts. Rest is okay,” he continues, deadpan.

If one listens carefully, though, Gupta’s conversation is littered with clues to his views on nudity and the body, especially his own. He reminisces about arriving in Montreal as a boy and being inducted into “this terrible thing called gym”: “I couldn’t get my clothes off, but finally I had to. And it was more boisterous and communal than I’d imagined.” He tells you about submitting his first fully nude self-portrait for a show called From Here to Eternity, in London in 1999. “I was quite anxious. Then I said to myself, it’s not me, it’s just a picture.” (From Here to Eternity was a landmark attempt to engage with his HIV+ status, with the potential decay of the body brought on by illness.) Then he segues animatedly into the present: “I happily wander around the house naked when it’s hot. But I forget that Indian people never get naked. The guy I’m living with now, he’s never seen himself naked…”

It’s not judgmental, but there is a proselytising undertone: nakedness is something he’s okay with, and other people should be, too.

The more serious charge against Gupta, levelled especially by those who have only seen his most recent Indian work, is that he is only interested in the celebratory documentation of a minuscule sub-section of the population, who’ve apparently achieved liberation in the classic Western sense. And the movement from an older series like ‘Exiles’ to the recent highly performative ‘The New Pre-Raphaelites’ or the more sentimental ‘Love, Undetectable’ does seem to create a teleological narrative—one in which queer sexuality in India has emerged from the darkness and anonymity of the 1980s into the warm radiant light of the 2000s.

Undeniably, there’s much to celebrate: most obviously the Delhi High Court’s landmark judgment in 2009 striking down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalised consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex. But surely things are more complex? Barring a single tragic image of Dr SR Siras (the Aligarh Muslim University professor who died in 2010 after being suspended and publicly humiliated by AMU for a homosexual act), Queer’s narrative of queerness in India does feel like it’s inside a bubble. This seems especially surprising coming from a man who speaks wistfully of drag entertainment in working class pubs in England and the lack of sharp, political performance among kothis and hijras here; who, as early as 1986, captioned a Delhi picture of one man looking up at another with the unforgettable line: ‘The difficulty of organising a gay group is whether one should include the riffraff’. Gupta seems to have pre-empted the question, though. He is hard at work on his next project: documenting kothis in low-income Delhi neighbourhoods. And what he says about them makes it clear that things haven’t changed that much for the majority of Indian queer folk: “They get married; they know when they’re 45 they can’t stand on a street corner any more.”

Published in Open magazine, 21 May 2011

Delhi: Postcards from the Last Century

On a photography exhibition:


Images courtesy of Alkazi Foundation for the Arts

The Alkazi Foundation’s newest exhibition of vintage photographs is an ambitious one: it takes as its subject a much-photographed city, while limiting itself to images from a time that ensures that very few visitors to the show will recognize that city as one they know. 'Historic Delhi: Early Explorations of the Camera c. 1860-1950', showing at the National Gallery of Modern Art, consists almost entirely of photographs from the last century of colonial rule. But under that broad rubric is a variety of pictures.

There are memorable – if strangely empty – images of Delhi’s monuments after 1857 for example, created by pioneering photographers like Samuel Bourne and Felice Beato, and there are high-quality photographs, often of the same monuments, taken for documentary purposes by the Archaeological Survey of India. There are photographs by the famous pre-independence studios, like Lala Deen Dayal, documenting with aplomb such grand affairs as the Delhi Durbars of 1903 and 1911, or showing troops being dispatched along the Grand Trunk Road, a cloud of dust rising around the horses’ feet. There are a few lovely, carefully chosen pictures from the 1940s and 1950s, mostly taken by the news photographer couple Maneckshaw and Homai Vyarawalla – these include some haunting images of Ramlila performers. And finally, there are the anonymous images – annotated, if we’re lucky, with a year and a subject.

In some ways, it is these last that are the most interesting, because they fit less easily into any preconceived category in our heads. Looking at an image like ‘Miss Azijan of Delhi, c.1905’ – a young and pretty woman, photographed without purdah and alone, in 1905 – one imagines she must be a courtesan. But not knowing the photographer or his purpose – British or Indian, old or young, official or tourist, admirer or anthropologist – sharpens our interest. One’s eyes linger longer on Miss Azijan’s carefully arranged pose: one knee placed perfectly upon another, the self-possessed finger on her chin, and the face that remains somehow towards the camera – even as her gaze turns intriguingly away.

Sometimes, of course, a mere caption is enough to slot the image: a shy looking young girl with large earrings, dressed in gypsy fashion, can never escape the words, ‘Delhi Dancing Girl, c. 1905’. It was Jean-Luc Godard who once pointed out that the photograph is “physically mute”. “It talks,” he said, “through the mouth of the text beneath it.” Sometimes, I suppose, that can be a good thing. There are certainly moments when this exhibition comes to life through the inscriptions. Not contemporary curatorial ones (though those are informative enough), but old inscriptions that mark the image, conjuring up with great immediacy the past that lies congealed within it. A postcard with an image of the Mutiny Memorial that bears an exceptionally clear Leighton Buzzard postmark for May 23, 3pm (though the year was illegible to me) – and this laconic message: “Dear Flo, This place was put up by comrades of the men who died in the mutiny.” Closer to the bone is the image of Bara Hindu Rao, with a handwritten inscription as follows: “Our main picquet during the siege. Very hard fighting all round this place.”

Whether the past you’re looking for lies in the stately and studiously composed archival image, or in the postcard accidentally discovered, this is an exhibition worth visiting.

(Published in The India Tube)

The Power of the Photograph: Historic Delhi

A review essay on the 'Historic Delhi' photography exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art, in The Caravan.

The Jama Masjid during the Delhi Durbar of 1877

Roland Barthes once wrote that photography started out by photographing the notable, but soon it decreed notable whatever it photographed. Almost all the images in Historic Delhi: Early Explorations of the Camera c. 1860-1950, the Alkazi Foundation’s newest exhibition of vintage photographs, belong to that truly early era, when the camera was still understood as something meant only to capture the momentous, the monumental or, at the very least, the exotic. Which is probably why, to our jaded 21st-century eyes, these pictures seem, at first glance, somewhat dull. As Susan Sontag already understood in On Photography (1977), “[t]he image-surfeited are likely to find sunsets corny; they now look, alas, too much like photographs.”

It is a difficult task to imagine in 2010 how magical it must have been to see, circa 1880, the Jama Masjid as one saw it every day from Dariba Kalan, or the Red Fort on a wintry morning, captured in silver and grey, frozen into permanent two-dimensional form. It is particularly difficult at a time when the many channels of the ceaseless image-production machine—hoardings, tourist brochures, newspaper supplements, television channels—bombard us (or at least those of us who live in Delhi) with images of these very structures, almost challenging the eye not to see them as clichés.

And yet, if one gives them a chance, some of the Historic Delhi images can make the same things appear utterly fresh. Sometimes it is the mental doubletake as the eye recognises some element that has remained constant in a space otherwise almost entirely transformed. Sometimes it is the starkness of the composition, the frame empty of everything except the building — a building we may have seen a million times, but never without people. The gleaming whiteness of the Hazrat Nizamuddin dargah in Samuel Bourne’s image from 1865, or Humayun’s Tomb in an Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) photograph from 1923-4, for example, appear almost eerily unmarked by human presence—or time.

What is the visual pleasure one might get from such an image? It is the opposite of that which one usually derives from old things — rather than presenting us with the comforting patina of age, the old photograph magically strips away layers of time to reveal an object that is almost unbelievably pristine.

This ability to conjure up a slice of the past, to make it seem as concrete, as specific, as real as everything we see around us in the present — this is the unique power of the photograph. But it is a double-edged sword. Photography constantly seeks to capture the present, but by virtue of having captured it, imbues that present with pastness. And like modernity itself, while it seeks to preserve what is past, it is irrevocably embroiled in the disappearance of that past.

The history of early photography everywhere is entwined with the history of vanishing peoples and customs. Sontag puts it sharply, as always: “From the start, photographers not only set themselves the task of recording a disappearing world, but were so employed by those hastening its disappearance.”

If colonial era anthropologists everywhere, from the Americas to Africa, saw it as crucial to photograph the traditional life-worlds they were studying, urban photography in the 19th century sought to enshrine a fast-changing Paris and London. In the Indian context, of course, photography was hardly independent of the colonial apparatus. Much has been written about its connections to the machinery of military and administrative expansion, as well as the fixing of colonised identities into a frozen ethnographic present — even as the world being fixed in images was being transformed by the same colonial processes.

There is now also a growing body of writing that examines photography’s role in the recording and preserving of historic buildings. The legendary French conservationist Eugene Viollet-le-Duc commissioned a series of daguerrotypes of Notre Dame Cathedral before he began his controversial restoration in 1842. In colonial India, too, accurately depicting the extent of decay — the pre-restoration photograph — was seen as the first step in bringing a building’s state to wider notice, and thus preserving it. There was also the post-restoration photograph. Official records were thus created in what we might now refer to as ‘Before and After’ mode.

The Alkazi exhibition presents us with at least three such images from the ASI, all immaculately composed, and bereft of people: the impressively Ozymandias-like ‘Entrance to Purana Qila before restoration, Delhi, 1914’; the earlier mentioned ‘Humayun’s Tomb with restored Tank and Gardens, Delhi, 1923-4’ and ‘Tomb of Illtutmish, c.1915,’ showing the interior in splendid detail. There are also images here that belong to a related tradition, ‘the picturesque.’ An artistic style that evolved in 18th-century Europe and became a staple of colonial representation, the picturesque composition involved landscapes with classical buildings, preferably in a state of ruin, preferably overrun by vegetation, and—unlike the scientific architectural photograph, which was almost always devoid of people — a few human figures visible at a distance, preferably ragged. The famous photograph of Flagstaff Tower, Delhi, taken in 1858-9 by Felice Beato and included in this exhibition, is in this mould. Although it is too soon after the 1857 revolt for the building to be overgrown, there are visible cannon holes in the wall and doors and a boundary wall swiftly turning to rubble — well as three carefully positioned natives, their faces in shadow.

It has been argued that such images, with their emphasis on a glorious past and a ruinous present, worked to legitimise a colonial narrative of civilisational transition. Whether you find this convincing or not, it is impossible to ignore the startling emptiness of these frames, and the strangely controlled human presence. In the first of three Chandni Chowk images, a moustachioed man looks calmly into the camera. In the second, taken by Samuel Bourne, the three men mid-frame have clearly been told to stay there and stand still. The third is the oddest: the shadows are strong and the streets deserted, except for a single figure perched on a buffalo. An odd image to create, surely, of what had to have been the busiest bazaar in the city?

Chandni Chowk, photographed by Samuel Bourne

But perhaps all this is barking up the wrong tree, and all that the picture testifies to is the shimmering heat of a Delhi summer afternoon, people hiding from the sun which glints off the buffalo’s back. And there are, indeed, simpler pleasures to be derived here. One smiles happily to oneself at the bamboo trellises around planted saplings and cement enclosures around them, their concrete particularity turning this unfamiliar black and white city into one we know.

An ASI image of the Diwan-i-Khas, circa 1880, shows the fort shorn of all its splendid lived grandeur—there are none of the furnishings that must have existed even 25 years previous. This is cleverly juxtaposed with an image from 1913-4, called ‘Recreated Mughal Room, Khwabgah,’ which marks an experiment where Mughal palaces in Delhi, Lahore and Agra were restored and refurbished under the ASI’s John Marshall. In a different part of the exhibition is a photograph from an in-between decade: the Red Fort lit by electric lights, looking incongruously like a ballroom— apparently taken just before the arrival of the guests at Curzon’s Delhi Durbar, 1903.

A preliminary thought that might bear considering: the colonial-era images we see here seem to contain either the rigidly controlled two or three locals, or else move full scale into the realm of the crowd. The most impressive of these crowd pictures is of people gathered outside the Jama Masjid during the 1877 Durbar: a vast assemblage of humans surrounded by their camel carts, bael gadis and innumerable buffaloes, and the mosque rising up at the back, every available parapet overflowing with people.

One whole section, in fact, is devoted to the three Delhi Durbars of 1877, 1903 and 1911. Most of these images—the vast tent cities, or the king and queen on an elephant—are staid depictions of the notable, a la Barthes. But there are exceptions. One such is the photograph of the Begum of Bhopal arriving at the 1911 Durbar, which is arresting for many reasons. First, it is among the few images in the exhibition with a person in the foreground, occupying at least a third of the frame. But more than that, it is that the woman striding purposefully toward us is completely veiled. All eyes are upon her, within the frame and without, but her expression, even the look in her eyes, will forever remain a mystery. In ‘Elephant Being Howdahed, 1911-2,’ a huge crowd of attendants is gathered around the poor patient beast, with only two men actually involved in fixing the howdah. It is a sharp visual commentary on the vast scale of (probably largely unnecessary) labour that kept the Raj running.

The mid-20th century section is relatively dull, redeemed only by some splendid photographs taken (separately) by Homai and Maneckshaw Vyarawalla. While Homai’s ‘Christmas Day Celebrations, 1947,’ with its grinning crowds in Connaught Place, satisfies one’s latent desire for a celebratory post-Independence moment, it is Maneckshaw’s lovely Jantar Mantar image from 1945 that seems to offer the perfect response to the constrictedness of all the earlier monument images. Two women in ghunghats descend the Jantar Mantar staircase, while at the far end of the lawn two figures in sola topis — policemen? — walk away from us. The monument is still very much centre-stage, but the women are neither dwarfed nor alienated by it. It is not a space they are likely to have been in before, and neither the building nor the stately rows of palm trees offers any shade from the sun—yet they seem, somehow, entirely at home.

Published in The Caravan.

Out of Obscurity

Published in Time Out Delhi, 2008. 

Trisha Gupta shows you around four alternatives to the big Delhi tourist staples.



Begampur Masjid

If you’re curious about the masjid-i-jamis that preceded Shahjahan’s glorious Jama Masjid, this is a wonderful surprise. This massive fourteenth-century stone mosque may be bare of ornamentation – characteristic of the Tughlaq era in which it was built – but it is magnificent. Now somewhat hemmed in by the urban villages of Begumpur and Kalu Sarai (themselves circumscribed by Sarvodaya Enclave and Sarvapriya Vihar), this was once the centre of the Tughlaq city of Jahanpanah. Look for one of the staircases that still lead all the way up to the roof. Even on a pleasant day, you’ll only have a couple of kite flyers for company.


From Aurobindo Marg, take the left turn towards Sarvodaya Enclave. Keep going until you reach Begumpur Village. Park your car before you enter the village. The masjid is a two-minute walk away. Visit before sunset. Free.


Zafar Mahal

A getaway for the bored residents of the Red Fort, the pretty Zafar Mahal was the part-time residence of the late Mughals. Many of these rulers were great believers in the powers of the Sufi saint Qutubuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki, and so they built this little palace next to his dargah in Mehrauli. Go through the lovely arched gateway and seat yourself in the pillared dalan upstairs to play at being emperor. Also visit the charming Moti Masjid and the now sadly derelict-looking graves. Those buried here include Bahadur Shah I, the luckless Shah Alam II (who was blinded by the Rohillas), his son Akbar Shah and prince Mirza Fakhru (son of Bahadur Shah II, better known as Zafar). Zafar, who had once reconstructed the mahal to allow elephants to enter, could never be buried in his intended grave (the empty one here), because he died in exile in Burma.

Starting at Adham Khan’s tomb (next to Mehrauli bus stand), walk down the main street towards Bakhtiyar Kaki’s dargah. Remove your shoes and carry them with you through the dargah. Open sunrise to sunset. If closed, ask around for the gatekeeper: he’s usually nearby, “just getting a cup of tea”. Free.



Teen Murti House

Visitors to Delhi are usually taken off to see the Rashtrapati Bhavan, only to be left standing admiringly outside the beautiful wrought iron gates. (Unless, of course, you’ve had the foresight to book ahead. To arrange a tour, call 2301-5321.) Console yourself (and your deprived guests) by going off to see Teen Murti House, where you can happily traipse through the lovely lawns and wander through most of the interior. Originally called Flagstaff House, this rather grand 1930s building was designed to serve as the residence of the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces by Robert Tor Russell, then head of the PWD’s architects department. Nehru moved in in 1948, and it remained his home until his death in 1964. The building now serves as a museum to Nehru. As official residences go, we’d choose to live there over Rashtrapati Bhavan any day.
Teen Murti. Tue-Sun, 10am-5pm. Free.

Mutiny Memorial

We like India Gate, really, but it’s more for the atmosphere of revelry – the unselfconscious takeover of this imposing imperial monument by picnicking families and shutterbug tourists. The fact that this 138ft high War Memorial Arch was meant to honour Indian soldiers who died in the First World War seems to barely register.

For a more sombre taste of Raj-style commemoration, visit the Mutiny Memorial up on Rani Jhansi Road, just west of Delhi University. This 1863 structure is now endowed with a small plaque (to inform you that these guys were fighting on the “wrong side”, so to speak, during 1857). The Mutiny Memorial is a great example of “High Victorian Gothic” – the nineteenth-century revival of a medieval architectural style that emphasised heavy detailing, strong vertical lines, and pointed arches to give a sense of height. Climb up the steps for a great view of the city.

Rani Jhansi Road, south of Hindu Rao Hospital. Open sunrise to sunset. Free.

Time Out Delhi Vol 2 Issue 16 (October 31 - November 13, 2008)

(Reproduced in Mint, Dec 5, 2008.)

Remembering the Revolt

On its 150th anniversary, I map the trajectory of the Revolt of 1857 in Delhi. (A piece written for Time Out Delhi, in May 2007)

Mosque Picket, Delhi. Felice Beato, albumen print, photographer’s ref D3, 1858-59, 253 x 304 mm. This Mosque was strategically at a vital position, approximately the centre of the Ridge, thereby covering the most vulnerable segment of the British camp. The complete absence of human life suggests that the photograph was taken after September 14th 1857, when the Mosque was abandoned.

If you know where to look, it’s easy to find the Chauburja Mosque. Hemmed in by a veritable forest of greenery, just inside an iron fence that sets that section of the northern Ridge apart from the Delhi University Campus, it’s like a surprise present that declares itself by being gift-wrapped. What’s harder to do is to recognise it as the same place as the one in the picture above. The Chauburja dates back to either 1354 or 1373, the reign of Firuz Shah Tughlaq. Lucy Peck, an expert on Delhi’s monuments, suggests that it was originally a square tomb and was only later converted into a mosque with “plain late-Mughal decorations”. But for any viewer in the know, the real impact of this image is inseparable from its status as a “Mutiny photograph”.

Felice Beato’s photograph of the Chauburja was taken during the photographer’s now-legendary visit to India in 1858 to document “the Mutiny”. It now lives out a quiet afterlife, along with several such remarkable images, in the archive of the Alkazi Foundation. The caption for this picture (as provided by the Foundation) reads, “Mosque Picket: This Mosque was strategically at a vital position, approximately the centre of the Ridge, thereby covering the most vulnerable segment of the British camp. The complete absence of human life suggests that the photograph was taken after September 14th 1857, when the Mosque was abandoned.”

In Beato’s image, the mosque still has three of its four burjes (domes), though a few cannon holes seem to bear witness to its role in the recent violent events. But what gives the image its sense of utter desolation is not so much the cannon holes, or even the plaster and stone facing that has fallen away in patches, throwing open to the elements the structure’s inner core of rubble – though these are part of it. It is the total isolation of the structure; the way it emerges, solitary and clearly unused, out of a largely barren rocky landscape.

Beato arrived in India straight from the Crimean War, where he had been engaged, along with Roger Fenton, in the creation of some of the first photographic images of an ongoing war. Images that were something like a precursor to the “live footage” that, at the beginning of the twenty first century, we have come to both greedily expect and cynically disregard. As far as the 1857 uprising was concerned, however, Beato arrived too late to be able to actually capture the events as they took place. Not easily dissuaded, he went from Lucknow to Delhi to Kanpur, in each place assiduously “setting the scene” so that he could recreate something of the immediacy of history as it happened. Beato’s most famous image, ‘Interior of the Sikanderbagh after the Slaughter of 2000 Rebels” is a stunning instance of this procedure – he actually ordered the exhumation of half-buried corpses so that he could pose the skeletal remains in the courtyard of Sikanderbagh. The photograph that resulted clearly achieved something of Beato’s desired effect – it was later wrongly captioned in London, suggesting that it had been taken on the very day of the assault in Sikanderbagh.

But the four human figures in the foreground of the mosque look anything but spontaneous. They appear, in fact, laboriously positioned (and how long they must have had to remain still, in those days of long exposure photography) – deliberately inserted into the picture to provide human scale as well as to depict some of the natives, now suitably subdued. The two turbaned men in the front look up at the mosque with what? Admiration? Awe? Or simply indifference? We cannot see their expressions. Beato’s carefully composed image successfully incorporates the now-docile natives – but it cannot so easily determine what the natives see.

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It is impossible, today, to view the mosque from the position of the two men in Beato’s picture. For one thing, if you get that distance away from the structure, you will probably be standing outside the fence that separates the now park-like Ridge area from the road. For another, it is surrounded by shady trees, whose branches hang low over the single remaining dome and occasionally swing dangerously close to your head as a large female monkey swoops down to gather up her unprotected infant. Monkeys, in fact, own the masjid. There is a whole colony of them that seems to live here, whooping and chattering and clambering all over it. And there are many more, all along the path that leads from the Chauburja to the Flagstaff Tower, picking the lice from each other’s heads with an uncannily human look of concentration. The atmosphere is simultaneously junglee and domestic.

It is hard to believe that this fenced-in park, with its odd combination of leafy greenery and tarred pathways, families of monkeys and families of evening walkers – many of whom carry stout sticks to ward off the unwanted attentions of said simians – is the same stretch of the Delhi Ridge which historian Percival Spear described as “bare, a stony furnace in the hot weather, and a mirror of heat for civilians and soldiers on either side.” It becomes a little easier to imagine if you read Lucy Peck, who points out that the Ridge in the nineteenth century was covered in nothing more than low scrub – afforestation began only in the twentieth century.

Flagstaff Tower, Delhi. Felice Beato, albumen print, 1858-9, 254 x 304 mm. The Delhi Ridge lies between Flagstaff Tower and Hindu Rao’s House. European survivors of the Delhi massacres assembled in the Tower in May 1857. The building still exists, and has not altered in appearance since this photograph was taken. It is now within the campus of Delhi University, close to the Vice-Chancellor’s residence.

The low-level, sparse vegetation was also the reason why this high point of the Ridge was a perfect site to locate a signal tower, which is what the Flagstaff originally was. High visibility apart, Spear argues that the Flagstaff, firmly planted at the top of the most difficult terrain in the region, was a concrete symbol of British determination to remain in possession of Delhi. The reason why the tower was one of Beato’s chosen sites, however, was the fact that during the course of the fateful day of May 11, 1857, it had become the gathering point for all the British families that had managed to escape with their lives from the cantonment and Civil Lines.

“The single interior room of the tower was only 18 feet in diameter, windowless and stuffy at the best of times; at the height of the hot season it was like an oven,” writes William Dalrymple in his detailed account of the day’s events. Many of the women massed inside were sent up a suffocating interior staircase, and several fainted, partly from lack of air and partly from the shock of the news that their husbands, brothers or sons had been killed. The young Florence Wagentrieber, one of those present, later described the scene, “There was not a tree near the tower to shelter it from the hot sun… the heat was unbearable, and the children were stripped of every garment.” Eventually, realizing (as Dalrymple puts it) that “this isolated tower was quite indefensible, and that to mass the women and children in such a spot was to invite a further and much larger massacre than that which had already taken place within the walls of the city,” and shocked by the appearance of a creaking bullock cart filled with the bodies of British officers who had been killed earlier that morning, the gathered crowd piled into whatever carriages they had and set off on the Grand Trunk Road towards or Panipat, Karnal and Ambala.

The British returned to the Ridge a month later, after defeating the rebel troops at the battle of Badli on June 8. The troops started to march from their camp at Alipore, 8 miles north of Delhi, at 1am. According to Zahir Dehalvi, an attendant to Bahadur Shah Zafar who was watching from the city walls, “When the English reached the cantonments, they saw that all the entrenchments were completely quiet. So they went up and occupied these posts, burnt the rebel camps and turned the abandoned cannon towards the city.” By 5pm that evening, the Ridge was in British hands. But they soon realized that though their intention was to besiege the city (and they had partly succeeded), they were now themselves besieged.

Not having the numbers to actually capture the city, the British had no option but to remain where they were and “somehow to cling on and endure whatever the rebels threw at them until such time as relief came.” Apart from the daily bombardment from the city, conditions on the Ridge were terrible – water was scarce, sewage arrangements minimal, and the rotting corpses of men and animals led to an epidemic of flies. Charles John Griffiths wrote of the lack of shelter from the unrelenting heat, so that many of the troops “died from apoplexy and sunstroke, their faces turning quite black in a couple of minutes.”

As you look around Flagstaff Tower today, at the neatly-planted rows of trees in every direction, it seems only natural to wonder whether the 1912 Town Planning Committee’s decision to thus domesticate the Ridge had something to do with the traumatic four months the British spent camped in the inhospitable, treeless expanse that it then was.

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Within the city, too, the months of June, July and August 1857 were a miserable time. Unlike the British, who at least had an unceasing supply of food and provisions, and were in a position to pay good prices for them, the citizens of Delhi suffered greatly from shortages. The large numbers of troops now massed in the city greatly increased the demand for foodstuffs and other goods, but their salaries were irregular and insufficient. As a result, there were constant complaints of civilians being looted by bands of soldiers, often based on the convenient belief that the citizen concerned, who had supplies of money or food, was a British sympathizer. For the mercantile class, both Muslim and Hindu, wrote Percival Spear, “the whole period was a long nightmare of forced loans, extortions and domiciliary visits, of insult and indignity… (while) the clerical class, mainly Hindu, tinctured with the new learning and British sympathies, lived in fear of denunciation as ‘friends of the English’.”

On the morning of September 11, the British marched down from the Ridge and advanced on the city in four separate columns. The Kashmiri Gate was the site of the first successful breach in the city walls, and thus became the emblem of the British takeover of Delhi. In November 1857, Governor-General Canning offered “a tribute of admiration and thanks to the brave soldiers… who accomplished the desperate task”. But the commemorative plaque that currently stands outside the gate was placed there by Lord Napier, the then Commander in Chief of the forces, a full twenty years afterwards, in 1876. It is not clear why the inscription took so long to come up, or why it was set up in 1876. Historian Nayanjot Lahiri has recently suggested that it may have been occasioned by the visit of the Prince of Wales to Delhi in January 1876, or more likely, as part of the preparations for the first Imperial Assemblage, which was also held in the city in 1877.

The Kashmiri Gate, Delhi. Samuel Bourne. Albumen print, photographer’s ref 1357, 1865, 231 x 292 mm. The Kashmiri Gate was built in 1835 by Major Robert Smith. In early 1857, it was made into a double gateway. The epic assault on Delhi began from this quarter in September 1857, and the Gateway became an iconic image of British victory over the ‘rebel’ forces.

The Imperial Assemblage of 1877 – a grand gathering of British officers and Indian princes to celebrate the fact of Queen Victoria having taken the title Empress of India in 1876 – marked some important shifts in British policy towards the city. The beautiful Zinat-ul-Masjid and the Fatehpuri Masjid at the western end of Chandni Chowk, which the British had turned into barracks and a bakery, respectively, in the immediate aftermath of 1856 as a way of punishing the citizenry (especially the Muslim citizenry who were seen as being predominantly responsible for the Revolt) were re-opened for public worship during the Assemblage. Together with the Jama Masjid, which had been re-opened for worship in 1862, however, the mosques were only handed back to the Muslim community on the condition that they would be maintained “in good repair”.

The irony of the British stipulating conditions for the upkeep of mosques that they had, only two decades ago, nearly destroyed and then used to house Sikh soldiers or rented to Hindu and Jain merchants as shop premises, was surely not lost upon the locals. But the British policy on the mosques needs to be seen not as merely outrageous, but as symbolic of a much wider shift, from destruction to conservation. The very fact that the Jama Masjid, or any of the other symbols of past Mughal grandeur, was not entirely demolished after the Revolt; that it remained to be photographed by someone like Samuel Bourne, came to be, for colonial viewers of these photographs, a sign of British generosity, of the colonisers’ inherent “civilisedness”.

Samuel Bourne, albumen print, 1865, 210 x 294 mm.
This view shows the desolate surroundings of the Jama Masjid. In the immediate aftermath of the Uprising, the Jama Masjid was almost destroyed as a mark of Imperial supremacy. The building was eventually desecrated by the British soldiers billeted there, and the prayer halls were used as stables for cavalry horses.

We are not an inherently memorializing people. We do not have a plaque at Kashmiri Gate declaring that it was, after the Revolt, the route through which thousands of Delhi’s citizens – “women who had never seen the outside of their zenana walls” – were stripped of all their money and jewels as they sought to flee the city. We have no signs that might tell you that the Jama Masjid was once, in that summer of 1857, the site for the massing of freelance jihadi fighters from places like Hissar and Tonk, or that the standard of jihad set up in the Masjid by one Maulvi Muhammad Sayyid was ordered to be taken down by Zafar that same day, to put an end to “such a display of fanaticism.” Or that in the immediate aftermath of 1857, there was a full-fledged campaign calling for its destruction. “There are several mosques in the city most beautiful to look at. But I should like to see them all destroyed,” wrote the soldier Hugh Chichester to his father. “The rascally brutes desecrated our churches and graveyards and I do not think we should have any regard for their stinking religion.” Some of the city’s loveliest mosques, like the Akbarabadi Masjid, and several grand palaces were actually levelled. The destruction of the others, and indeed of much of the city, was only prevented by the intervention of John Lawrence.

Looking at the Jama Masjid today, you’re unlikely to think about British “generosity”. Perhaps that amnesia is only natural, a measure of how happily distant that time is for us. But Bourne’s image, with the desolation of the open space forcibly cleared for 70 yards around the mosque, should at least serve to remind us of how close we came to not having it at all.

Published in Time Out Delhi, Vol 1 Issue 4, May 2007