Dispatch from Dharamshala – 2

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Films about animals at this year's edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival had powerful things to say about the state of our humanity 

The monkey as metaphor: a still from Prateek Vats's film Eeb Allay Ooo

You can never watch all the films at a film festival. What you can do is to make your choices, whether based on frontbencher commitment (read high-intensity googling of film titles) or a more backbencher attitude (what the lady in the loo queue seems excited about) and hope that the darkness of the auditorium will end up illuminating something you haven't quite seen before.
 

One of the things this year's DIFF threw into focus for me was age and ageing. There's no single model of the good life, but observing old people throws up possibilities to aspire to – or guard against. Archana Phadke's stunning documentary portrait of her grandparents and her parents, About Love, is as brutal as it is affectionate, letting us see these long-term relationships as the simultaneous safety nets and shackles they are. The bent, ancient fisherman of Kazuhiro Soda's Inland Sea smiles wryly about how the years can sneak up on you: “I thought I was still 50 or 60, turned out I had turned 90.” 

The other theme that seemed to me to emerge serendipitously from DIFF 2019 was animals. Zooming in on the non-human seemed, in film after film, to be a way of opening up the human condition. Sometimes the association felt subtle, like the gleaming night hauls of fish in Inland Sea that the old man disentangles from his net and tosses into the boat's watery hold, so they might live a little longer. The persistent slippery toughness of their bodies, leaping for life even at death's door, struck me as akin to their captor. 

Elsewhere, the weight of the beastly allegory seemed too much for the narrative to bear. The acclaimed Malayali director Lijo Jose Pelissery was at DIFF with his latest, Jallikattu, in which a buffalo due for slaughter runs amok, destroying plantations and shops in its wake. As the village men set off in pursuit, armed with nothing but ropes and their egos, it becomes clear that the film is only ostensibly about the buffalo.  

Pelissery's last two films, Angamaly Diaries and Ee Ma Yau,  demonstrated a talent for richly orchestrated set pieces, but Jallikattu feels more like a runaway display of that ability than a controlled experiment. For most of the film's running time, we watch men with flaming torches tramp through acres of hilly woodland and splash through streams, yelling, leaping, tearing at each other, with increasingly less rational cause. The buffalo seems almost forgotten as long-held internecine rivalries bubble up. The energy of the crowd is both majoritarian and masculine – “We will take it! There are more of us!” The thrill of the hunt, the performative frenzy of competition, the adrenaline and the testosterone – these, Jallikattu drills into us, are what drive humanity at its basest. And somehow, humanity at its most primitive is signified by animality. 

“Even now, with us here, this place belongs to animals,” says a goggle-eyed old man in Jallikattu. The sentiment is echoed at one point in Prateek Vats's stellar feature debut, Eeb Allay Ooo!, when Mahinder the monkey repeller of seven generations declares to the befuddled new recruit Anjani (Shardul Bhardwaj) that he has been asked to help train: “This is the neighbourhood of Raisina, traditionally ruled by monkeys.”  

But neither Pellisery nor Vats seem actually interested in our relationship with the animal world. What Vats's film does brilliantly is to use the monkey as metaphor, creating a multifarious web of associations that traverse the distance between animal and god – but elude the human. The bonnet macaque monkeys of Lutyens' Delhi, as elsewhere in India, have exploded as a population partly because they are worshipped and fed as a form of Hanuman – and as a bit of video footage in the films repeats, “The gods become pests.” 

Combining real locations and non-actors with a sharp script and a core of trained actors, Eeb Allay Ooo! follows the travails of a Bihari migrant who is hired to shoo away monkeys from the national capital's most grandly symbolic architectural corridor. There are several interwoven strands that combine to make this such a scathing indictment of the state of the nation: the humour of a young man's masculinity seemingly pitted against monkeys, the deeply unfair conditions of contractual labour, the absurdity of bureaucratic rules that defeat all of Anjani's innovations on the job. Meanwhile, the performative masculinity of the state at both the lowest level: Anjani's security guard brother-in-law being forced to wield a rifle that he can barely carry – and the highest: the Republic Day parade – emerge as equally farcical. 

It is only when the man pretends to be an animal – in a man-sized monkey costume, in blackface imitation of the lion-tailed macaques of Karnataka's R-Day tableau – that he manages to scatter the monkeys. We watch him wander through the streets, a modern-day Hanuman in his own sad Ramleela. 

His success is because the monkeys cannot tell the difference between a real langur and a fake one. Mahinder's real death at a mob's hands goes unmourned. Meanwhile, towards the film's end, the real rifle ends up in a costume tailor's shop, its value as limited to the performative as the fake costume. When, in the last scene, the jobless Anjani joins the parade of Hanuman impersonators, we know acche din has made monkeys of us all.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Nov 2019. 

Acrobats of the Upper Canopy

Don’t be fooled by the name or the sharp canines, the endangered lion-tailed macaque

is a shy, fruit-eating primate that inhabits the upper canopy of the rainforests of the Western

Ghats.

Slug: Narr

Don’t be fooled by the name or the sharp canines, the endangered lion-tailed macaque

is a shy, fruit-eating primate that inhabits the upper canopy of the rainforests of the Western

Ghats.

Slug: Narr

Reporting and researching this piece was a joy, though it also made me tragically aware of how we're ruining the earth for other creatures. It's my first piece for the nature and environment website Roundglass Sustain (please click link for all the superb pictures). 

Don't be fooled by the name or the sharp canines, the endangered lion-tailed macaque is a shy, fruit-eating primate that inhabits the upper canopy of the rainforests of the Western Ghats.

It was April 2014, and I was in the Western Ghats to meet an endangered primate. We drove on, the way the man had pointed, our gazes fixed on the tangled canopy. There! A group of monkeys with black faces, black bodies, and light facial hair. But Erinjery chuckled. This wasn’t the monkey we wanted. The Nilgiri langur we’d met has glossy black fur and a striking mane, similar enough to be confused with the monkey we were looking for. But what distinguishes our chosen primate is its shorter, tufted tail.

Fewer than 4,000 lion-tailed macaques — locally known as simhavaala or singavaal kurangu, literally ‘lion-tailed monkey’ — exist in the wild. They are, Erinjery informs me, divided into approximately 47 subpopulations across at least seven locations in the Western Ghats. These wet evergreen forests are also home to an impressive array of endemic plant and animal life, including over a dozen mammals found nowhere else in the world. The lion-tailed macaque, fondly abbreviated to LTM, is one of those: so perfectly adapted to these forests that conservationists are convinced it can function as an umbrella species. Protect it and you protect the whole forest ecosystem.

And it needs protection. The Ghats run about 1,600 km from north to south, but according to the research of wildlife biologist Dr. Ajith Kumar, forests now cover only about 25 percent of the slopes. The British began felling as early as the late 19th century to create cardamom, coffee and tea plantations. Agriculture, dams and human settlement have only speeded up the depletion. Since about 2004, though, Nelliyampathy’s macaques have benefited from an unusual land use shift: at least three plantations have been reclaimed by the state forest department and begun a slow return to wilderness. By Erinjery’s estimate, Nelliyampathy in 2014 had some 200 lion-tailed macaques living in 14 groups, making it one of the best places to see LTMs in a somewhat natural environment. But LTMs in the wild are shy. As soon as they spied us, they would move deeper into the jungle.

******

Usually found climbing and leaping through trees some 60 to 100 feet tall, the LTM leads its arboreal life with a lithe grace that belies the astounding height of its acrobatics. Its style is poise, not display. It barely ever descends to the ground even for water, managing on fruit sap and dew.

Unlike the Nilgiri langur, whose whooping ‘hoo hoo hoo’ calls are among the most frequent sounds of the jungle, it rarely makes much noise, devoting most of its energy to the search for food. The only thing you might hear as it travels through the upper canopy is a gentle ‘coo’, helping keep the group together.

When Erinjery and I finally found the LTMs, a silent feast was in progress. A group of about 40 was scattered across a clump of jackfruit trees on either side of the road. A large oblong fruit, fibrous yellow inside and ribbed green outside, the jackfruit originated in these forests. So it makes sense that it is one of the favourite foods of the LTMs, the oldest of the Western Ghat macaques. But the jackfruit is the largest tree-borne fruit in the world, weighing up to 36 kilos, while LTMs are among the world’s smaller macaques, reaching a head-body length of only 16 to 24 inches and an adult weight between 2 and 10 kilos. It’s quite a sight to watch: an LTM balancing itself between two branches, using its forelimbs like arms to immobilize a jackfruit larger than itself, then tearing into it with sharp front teeth. I even saw a sub-adult carry one away to eat in peace, climbing with its back limbs while holding the fruit with the front two and its teeth.

Like other primates, LTMs have forward-facing eyes and excellent vision, as well as opposable thumbs dexterous enough to manipulate fruits. Other than jackfruit, they eat figs, spiny green wild durian, elephant apples, and mangoes, supplementing this frugivorous diet with insects: caterpillars, spiders, cicadas and mantises picked off leaves. A juvenile LTM is likely to spend more time foraging for invertebrates than a grown one. Like human children, they need more protein.

Also like human babies, LTMs take time to grow up. The more common bonnet macaque, often found in close proximity to the LTM, has a similar lifespan, of about 20 years. But while a bonnet macaque starts reproducing at age 3 and gives birth every year thereafter, an LTM female is, on average, 6.6 years old when she first gives birth — the oldest among all macaques. And she will have only two or three infants in her lifetime.

LTMs usually live in groups of about 20, with a single dominant male. Where do the other males go? The answer is a fascinating one. While adult females remain in the group they were born into, an adult male LTM must migrate when it turns five or six, and enter another group to mate. An anti-incest rule!

******

Nelliyampathy’s 736 sq. km. of fragmented forest has begun to redevelop the connectivity needed for LTM males to migrate. But a full third of the world’s LTMs now live in privately-owned forest patches crisscrossed by plantations and human settlements. For every LTM in Nelliyampathy, there is at least one living in Valparai, 130 km away. There, I watched in disbelief as two male LTMs ambled across a busy road to investigate a heap of trashed plastic plates for leftover rice and dal. Returning to our jeep, I found another macaque peering out of it cartoonishly, as if to say, “What guys? No food?”

But the state of LTMs in Valparai was no joke.

Like Nelliyampathy, Valparai began as a colonial plantation area. Today, though surrounded by the protected forests of Anamalai Tiger Reserve, Valparai is a much larger urban settlement. Also, unlike the shady half-jungles of coffee and cardamom that play host to LTMs in Nelliyampathy, Valparai is dominated by tea estates, whose greater tree-clearance amplifies the habitat fragmentation that is the biggest long-term threat to these macaques.

Two of the largest Valparai groups, comprising 160-odd LTMs, are living a strange new life: isolated from other groups, hemmed in by human habitation, spending 30-40 percent of their time on the ground instead of the four percent normal for the species, and consuming new foods.

In Valparai, it is tragically common to see LTMs by the roadside, making an easy breakfast off local cultivars like the guava. When a car stops, a daring male can get a still easier snack. I saw three different monkeys show up for their fix of fried, salty processed food.

Ananda Kumar, a scientist at the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) in Valparai, suspects that growing construction and tourist traffic has increased human-animal interaction, changing LTM behaviour and causing conflict and roadkill. To help, Kumar and his team had built fire-proof canvas bridges to link the tree canopies on opposite sides of the busiest roads, and hired two staffers to track these two groups daily. Between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., they held up placards telling drivers to ‘Go Slow’ and tried to persuade day trippers — many from a rising tribe of amateur photographers — not to feed the monkeys.

These are emergency measures. Long-term conservation needs plantation owners to work with the NCF. Restoring forest fragments and planting connecting tree corridors across a nude expanse of tea bushes would help create a self-sustaining habitat, in which migrating males from one LTM group can find a mate in another.

The growing number of LTMs in Valparai can appear a good thing, especially since hunting remains a threat elsewhere. But the larger group has 120 individuals, more than six times the size of an average group in the wild. Both groups have become multi-male, and Mysore-based primatologist Mewa Singh says the biological effects of the inbreeding “will only show themselves in several generations.” And given radically altered diets and exposure to human diseases, a ballooning population could suddenly crash.

What I’d learned about the lion-tailed macaque in the wild was that they were almost entirely arboreal, uni-male societies, dependent on the fruits of the rainforest and its connected canopies. In Valparai, all of this had changed. But unlike bonnet macaques and rhesus macaques, known to commonly snatch food and act aggressively with humans, the LTM’s forced engagement with the human world has not yet changed their essential temperament. As one of the placard-holding NCF trackers said, “Sometimes they come and touch us gently on the shoulder. They’re soft-type animals. If you don’t disturb them, they don’t disturb you.”

I can only wonder how much further we intend to push them.

Published in Roundglass Sustain, July 2019.

The Lions of the Trees

A piece I did on the lion-tailed macaque, for Smithsonian magazine. I had a brilliant time reporting this, though it was chopped drastically in the end. The magazine decided that the photographs were the point, which isn't that surprising if you look at them: here, in a slide-bar on the website. (The two below are taken by me). 

Back when the forest was thicker, it was difficult even to catch a glimpse of a lion-tailed macaque. Small, shy and quiet (nearly silent by howler standards), the monkeys are so habituated to the shadow-filled canopy that some scientists consider them the only truly arboreal macaques on earth. And they only live in the Western Ghats, a mountain range along India’s western coast. Because counting the furtive creatures isn’t easy, the best guess is that only 3,500 or so survive. Whether that number is greater or fewer than decades ago isn’t certain, but the more scientists know about the monkey, the more they fear that road-building, logging and other human encroachments pose a serious threat to the glossy black primate with the arresting mane and tufted, leonine tail. 

A small village in the state of Kerala, in southwestern India, Nelliyampathy is among the best places to see lion-tailed macaques in what looks like a relatively intact habitat. Many nearby coffee and tea plantations have been abandoned and have begun their slow return to wilderness. My guide, Joseph J. Erinjery, a gangly 27-year-old graduate student at the University of Mysore, spots a group of about 40 animals feasting in jackfruit trees and brings his truck to a halt. The slapstick scene before us pits one of the world’s smallest macaques, maxing out at some 20 pounds and two feet tall, against the world’s largest tree-borne fruit, which can weigh as much as 100 pounds and reaches three feet. I watched a monkey balance between two branches, use its forelimbs to immobilize a jackfruit larger than itself and proceed to tear into it with sharp front teeth. I also saw a young male teetering on two legs as he carried one off to eat on his own.

About a three-and-a-half-hour drive southeast of here, in and around Indira Gandhi National Park, in the state of Tamil Nadu, the photographers Anup Shah and Fiona Rogers spent four weeks observing the daily rhythms of another troop of macaques. “Feed, rest, feed, rest, feed, rest, move to another site, feed and rest,” Shah says jokingly of the monkey’s lifestyle.

Lion-tailed macaques live in groups of, on average, 15 individuals. Groups often have a dominant male, and while adult females remain in the group they are born into, males tend to leave at the age of 5 or 6 to find another group in which to mate. This puts the primates at added risk when habitat is broken up, as it is near the town of Valparai, in Tamil Nadu. Roads not only pose a direct threat—some animals have taken to begging for snacks from tourists, and a number of monkeys have been run over—but also roads, reservoirs and other development make it tougher for roaming males to reach new groups. And that can keep them from breeding or lead to inbreeding, which causes health problems in the long run. Mewa Singh, a primate researcher at the University of Mysore who has spent two decades tracking lion-tailed macaques, said human encroachment’s most dramatic consequences “may show themselves only in several generations.”

Conservationists in the region are working with plantation owners and the government to support the remaining lion-tailed macaques. One approach is to limit forest-cutting and restore habitat. Another is to connect tree canopies with canvas bridges that span busy roads—to help these charismatic primates overcome the obstacles we’ve placed in their way.     

Published in Smithsonian magazine.

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.

                                                            ***

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.

                                                       * * *

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