Strange Men Strange Places Read online

  Soon after mid-day, Zephyr Hall residents were startled into brisk activity when a woman screamed and a shot rang out from one of the rooms. Other shots followed in rapid succession.

  Those boarders who happened to be in the public lounge or verandah dived for the safety of their rooms; but one unhappy resident, taking the precaution of coming around a corner with his hands held well above his head, ran straight into a levelled pistol. And the man with the gun, who had just killed his wife and wounded his daughter, was still able to see some humour in the situation, for he burst into laughter! The boarder escaped unhurt. But the murderer, Mr. Owen, did not savour the situation for long. He shot himself long before the police arrived.

  Ten years earlier, on twenty-fourth November 1917, another husband had shot his wife.

  Mrs. Fennimore, the wife of a schoolmaster, had got herself inextricably enmeshed in a defamation law-suit, each hearing of which was more distasteful to Mr. Fennimore than the previous one. Finally he determined on his own solution. Late at night he armed himself with a loaded revolver, moved to his wife's bedside, and, finding her lying asleep on her side, shot her through the back of the head. For no accountable reason he put the weapon under her pillow, and then completed his plan. Going to the lavatory, three rooms beyond his wife's bedroom, he leaned over his loaded rifle and shot himself.

  THE TOMB AND CITY OF TUGHLAQ SHAH

  "Ya base Gujar

  Ya rahe ujar."

  (May it be inhabited by Gujars,

  Or may it lie desolate.)

  HE CURSE OF Saint Nizam-ud-din has been effective. The desolate, crumbling battlements of Tughlaqabad, on the outskirts of modern Delhi, look down on peaceful fields and the tent-like tomb of the warrior king who built this city. It is difficult to reconstruct the picture the city must have presented when it was built just over six centuries ago; but here and there a massive bastion less weathered by time gives one some idea of its former magnificence. Today it is a mass of ruins, the home of the jackal and the porcupine; and sometimes a leopard from the hills near Alwar takes shelter in the more inaccessible underground passageways. The only signs of human life are the temporary huts of the Gujar goatherds, lean men with sharp eyes and sun-baked limbs.

  The curse which was laid on the city has been literally fulfilled.

  Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlaq was one of the few rulers of the period who emerges with an almost unblemished character. The greater part of his life, up to the time he was called to the throne, was spent fighting the battles of the Khiljis, until that dynasty fell due to the follies of Kutb-ud-din Mubarak. Tughlaq was pressed to ascend the throne himself, as it was generally acknowledged that this experienced old warrior was the only man who could restore order out of the chaos then prevailing.

  He was crowned in Delhi as Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlaq Shah. His father had been a Turkish slave of the Tughlaq tribe. His mother was a Jat woman, of Indian birth.

  Although old in years when he came to the throne, Tughlaq was vigorous in mind and body, and his actions justified the confidence placed in him. He did not seek to conciliate a few by making enormous gifts to favoured individuals, and the only malcontents were those who were disappointed by his policy of discouraging the accumulation of great wealth. He encouraged agriculture, and land which had remained waste during the former period of misrule came again under cultivation. He superintended the collection of revenue, and ruled that the only reward of the tax-gatherer would be the exemption of his own holdings from taxation.

  The rapidity with which Tughlaq made his authority felt was due partly to his excellent means of communication, by which despatches were passed on from hand to hand, either by runner or horseman. He was, in fact, the initiator of the Indian postal system. The stage for a runner was only about two-thirds of a mile (it was eight miles for the East India Company's runners), and this comparatively short distance could be covered swiftly. Huts were built along the route for the accommodation of these runners, and the system appears to have worked effectively. In the next reign, the arrival of the North African traveller Ibn Batuta at the mouth of the Indus was known in Delhi, a distance of between eight and nine hundred miles, in five days.

  Tughlaq Shah abandoned Siri, the capital of his predecessors — abandoning capitals was quite fashionable at that time — and chose a new site on a barren, rocky ridge, about three miles to the east of Siri. An extensive town and citadel were raised in the short space of four years.

  Today an atmosphere of melancholy grandeur broods over Tughlaqabad. In spite of the general decay, the southern face of the citadel still presents a formidable line of loopholed walls and towers. "Here," wrote the traveller Ibn Batuta, "were Tughlaq's treasures and palaces, and the great palace which he had built of gilded bricks which, when the sun rose, shone so dazzlingly that none could steadily gaze upon it." The only disadvantage was the absence of good drinking water, and this was probably one of the chief reasons why the city was later abandoned. It was for a similar reason that Akbar's great city of Fatehpur-Sikri was abandoned, and it seems strange to us today that great cities should have been built without first ascertaining the presence of a good and sufficient water supply.

  The construction of Tughlaqabad had been carried out with some difficulty. There are stories of the feud that existed between Tughlaq Shah and Saint Nizam-ud-din who was at the time excavating a tank at his shrine, some five miles distant. The holy man wanted the labourers who had worked on the walls of Tughlaqabad to continue working for him at night by the light of lamps. Tughlaq, disapproving of this, prevented the sale of oil to Nizam-ud-din; but the saint, it is said, caused a light to issue from the waters of the tank, and continued with the work. Tughlaq Shah then laid a curse of bitterness upon the waters of the shrine, and the saint retaliated with the famous curse on Tughlaqabad.

  Though a pious Mohammedan, Tughlaq had no intention of surrendering his authority to Nizam-ud-din. He was able to restrict the power of the saint, and this, it was said, resulted in the latter conspiring with the sultan's ambitious son Juna Khan in plotting the death of the king.

  Tughlaq was away in Bengal when he received news of his son's treachery; he wrote to Nizam-ud-din saying that when he returned to his capital, Delhi would be too small to hold both of them. It was then that Nizam-ud-din made the laconic remark which has become proverbial: "Hanuz Dihli dur ast", "Delhi is yet far distant."

  Tughlaqabad was gaily decorated to welcome the returning king. For the reception Juna Khan had erected a wooden kiosk, so flimsy that if any large animal leant against the structure, it would fall to the ground. Juna Khan then prepared a parade of elephants as part of the reception, and at a convenient moment the kiosk collapsed, burying the sultan beneath it.

  The event was afterwards described in detail by Sheikh Rukhn-ud-din, who was present at the reception and who was actually warned to leave the kiosk shortly before it overturned. The arrival of spades and other implements was delayed by Juna Khan. When at length Tughlaq's body was extricated from the ruins, he was found protecting with his body his youngest and favourite son.

  The tomb of Tughlaq Shah is perhaps one of the most handsome buildings outside modern Delhi; at one time it was surrounded on all sides by a small lake. There are three graves inside the tomb — those of Tughlaq Shah, his Queen, and Juna Khan himself, whose subsequent reign earned him the title of Khuni Sultan, "Bloody King". Firoz Shah, his successor, bought acquittances from all those Juna Khan had wronged, and put them in a chest at the head of his grave, that he might present them when called to judgement.

  THE STORY OF KARNAL

  ITTLE IS LEFT to show that the British ever had anything to do with Karnal: a decaying church tower, a forgotten cemetery, are all that remain of the unhappy cantonment that existed there from 1811 until 1841, The present town stands a little distance away, seventy-six miles from Delhi on the Grand Trunk Road.

  As I drove through the sleepy town on my way to Chandigarh, I could not help noticing the church tower to the ri
ght of the road; and stopping the jeep, I walked over to investigate this forgotten monument. As I approached, the twisted iron cemetery gate clanged, and about a dozen cows and buffaloes were led out of the enclosure. The boy in charge of them gazed curiously at me. Nobody could have visited the place for years, and he must have been wondering what I was doing there.

  I entered what must have been the chancel, directly beneath the bell tower. A flight of steps ran up to the belfry, but I did not trust them after all these years. I could see a patch of blue sky immediately above me. The floor was covered with cow-dung and the leavings of other animals, and I did not stay long enough to read the inscriptions on the few memorial tablets that remained on the walls.

  This impression of neglect gathered force when I entered the abandoned cemetery and walked cautiously through the long grass that almost hid the graves from the path. Most of the inscriptions had worn off the stone, but as I read some of them, a small chapter of history came alive again, and the tragedy of Karnal was brought home to me.

  Most of the graves belonged to women and children. Almost the entire cantonment population of Karnal had been wiped out by cholera and malarial fever when the city's drainage and the West Jumna canal met to form a swamp outside the town. Among those who perished — officers and men, their families and servants — were the wife and small daughters of Thomas Metcalfe, the Resident at Delhi. And still well-preserved is the grave of the Chaplain himself, who met the same fate as his parishioners at the age of thirty. Few people over forty are buried here. The gravestones were made in Delhi, by Hindu artisans — their names stand out small and clear at the corners of each stone — and those calamitous years must have made the undertakers rich, if they survived the epidemic themselves.

  Karnal first fell into British hands in 1797, when George Thomas seized the town from the Raja of Jind. But Thomas was no "servant of the Company". He was an Irish adventurer, who owed allegiance to no one, and in the space of a few years — with great daring and skill and a few devoted followers — made himself king of all the territory between Hansi and Karnal, and beyond. He fought the French and the Marathas and, for that matter, anyone who threatened his realm, and after a few glorious years was eventually driven out of Hansi after he had rendered himself insensible from a fierce bout of drinking occasioned by the death of his best officer.

  George Thomas's exploits would fill a book, but there is nothing in Karnal to remind us of his brief, blustering reign there. After his death, the town was conferred by Lord Lake upon Nawab Muhammed Khan, a Mandil Pathan.

  Karnal played a small but interesting part in the suppression of the rising in Delhi in 1857. I was reminded of this when by chance I stumbled across a marble slab which marked the resting-place of General Anson, Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces in 1857. He had died at Karnal, of cholera, while on the march to Delhi.

  The British force had marched all the way from Simla, a distance of about a hundred and fifty miles. The month was May, and it was impossible to march by day; the Grand Trunk Road was then an endless ribbon of burning sand.

  Years later, an officer, recalling the march, wrote:

  "The stars were bright in the dark deep sky and the fireflies flashed from bush to bush.

  "Along the road came the heavy roll of the guns, mixed with the jangling of bits and the clanking of the steel scabbards of the cavalry; the infantry marched behind with a deep, dull tread; camels and bullock-carts, with innumerable camp servants, toiled along for miles in the rear; while gigantic elephants stalked over bush and stone by the side of the road."

  Elephants were used to pull the heavy guns.

  But Karnal made history long before the British came to India. It is said to have been founded by Raja Kama, champion of the Kauravas, in the great war of the Mahabharata. It is the place where the Persian invader Nadir Shah defeated the Moghul Emperor Muhammed Shah in 1739. The battle lasted two hours, and 20,000 of the Emperor's soldiers were killed. The next day Nadir Shah marched to Delhi, to sack the city and massacre its inhabitants.

  No one passing through Karnal today would easily connect it with the momentous events it has seen. It is just like any other district town, its only relics a crumbling city wall and a neglected cemetery.

  Should anyone be deterred from spending too much time in Karnal by my account of the epidemic that once wiped out its cantonment, I ought to mention here that the canal was realigned in 1875, and Karnal is today as healthy as any town in the Punjab or Hariana.

  AN ENGLISH JESTER

  AT THE MOGHUL COURT

  N THE DIARIES and correspondence of Sir Thomas Roe, the English Ambassador to the Court of Jehangir, there are frequent references to a number of Englishmen who, for a few colourful years, strutted about the Indian scene, and then were heard of no more. The strangest of this group of fortune-hunters and eccentrics was Thomas Corryat, known at home as the "Odcombe legstretcher", a man of many parts who had earned a certain literary reputation as the author of Corryat's Crudities, a whimsical book on continental travel.

  Corryat, the son of a Somerset clergyman, gained early distinction as a sort of buffoon at the court of James I. His physical peculiarities — a peaked "sugar-loaf formation of head" perched on an ungainly frame — added to a ready wit, made him a favourite with the English king who later came to be called "the wisest fool in Christendom". Encouraged by his sovereign, he began, in 1608, a long series of wanderings which took him into almost every corner of Europe and resulted in his travel book, the Crudities, which was published by patrons whose help he obtained by "unwearied pertinacity and unblushing opportunity". The volume was foreworded with some mock-heroic verses by Ben Jonson, but the ridicule was lost on Tom Corryat, whose sense of humour lacked subtlety, thus rendering him immune to the barbs of satire.

  In 1612 Corryat again started on his travels, this time in the direction of the East. He tramped through the Holy Land, on to Nineveh and Babylon, down the Euphrates valley to Baghdad, through Persia to Kandahar, and down into India. He turned up at Agra in 1615, and presented himself before Ambassador Roe, who had known the wanderer at King James's court. Sir Thomas was by no means pleased to see Corryat, who was far from being the ideal image of the Englishman which Roe wished to project for the benefit of Jehangir; but he felt it was his duty to help the traveller before speeding him on his way.

  Tom Corryat, however, was in no hurry to move on. He boasted that he had made his way through Asia on little more than two pence a day, having in fact lived off the generosity of various benefactors. At Agra, the Moghul capital, he soon made himself at home. A natural linguist, he acquired such proficiency in Hindustani that it was said of him that, in a quarrel with the Ambassador's troublesome washerwoman, he reduced the lady to silence within an hour. . . .

  He made more dangerous use of his knowledge of the language one evening at the time of Mohammedan prayer when, in response to the muezzin's cry, "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet", he shouted in Hindustani that the true prophet was Christ. It says a great deal for the tolerance which then prevailed at the Moghul capital that this insult was overlooked as the indiscretion of the half-witted "English fakir". Corryat, however, made up for this blunder when, having somehow managed to obtain an audience of Jehangir, he recited a flattering eulogy of the Emperor, in Persian. Jehangir was both amused and pleased by this barefaced flattery, and dismissed Corryat with some kind words and a gift of a hundred rupees.

  When Sir Thomas Roe heard of the goings-on of his itinerant guest, he was furious, and raved at Corryat for an hour, accusing him of degrading the good name of England.

  "But," said Corryat, in describing the encounter, "I answered our ambassador in such a stout and resolute manner that he ceased nibbling at me."

  A time came when Tom Corryat, having exhausted the financial possibilities of the Moghul capital, decided to return home. Roe, only too happy to be rid of so embarrassing a guest, gave him a letter of introduction to the English consul a
t Alleppo, requesting the consul to receive Corryat with courtesy, "for you shall find him a very honest poor wretch", and asking him to pay the bearer £10. Corryat was hurt by the expression "honest poor wretch", but he accepted the letter.

  Leaving Agra, Corryat made for Surat, where he was hospitably received by the members of the English factory. In the course of a conversation mention was made of a shipment of sack which had just arrived from England. The wanderer's eyes glistened at this mention of his favourite drink, which he had long been without.

  "Sack! Sack!" he exclaimed. "Is there any such thing as sack? I pray you, give me some sack!" The factors obliged him, and Corryat, drinking to excess, collapsed dramatically. A few days later he was dead.

  Tom Corryat was laid to rest near Surat. Time has obliterated all traces of his grave; but local tradition has identified it with a monument in the Muslim style at Rajgari, a village near Swally, the old seaport of Surat. The memory of this strange individual's eruption into seventeenth-century India will always fascinate those who follow the lesser-known paths of history.

  GEMS FROM A BYGONE AGE

  HE ADVERTISEMENTS of a bygone era are often a livelier guide to the social life of a period than any number of serious tomes. During recent rummagings in a junkshop, I discovered a copy of The Calcutta Magazine of May 1882, still surviving on paper that was brown and delicate with age. It was not the rather pompous literary contents of the magazine that attracted me but the diversity of its advertisements. These were probably common enough eighty-five years ago. Read today, they provide vivid glimpses into the past, into the fashions, literary tastes, and medical remedies indulged in by our grandparents.

  I have made a small selection of those advertisements most likely to interest and amuse the modern reader, and reproduce them here without any changes.