Mughal rule in India

How Falsified History Is a Ready Tool to Deepen Communal Divide

There is a grand design behind falsification of history. It serves the purpose of deepening communal divide and achieving the desired degree of communal polarisation for electoral benefits.

A Bollywood lyricist Manoj Muntashir has released a 11-minute long video on YouTube titled Aap Kiske Vanshaj Hain? (‘Whose descendant are you?’).

At the time of writing this article, the video had over 2.3 lakh views and its one-minute version on Twitter had over 1.8 million views.

He presents his own version of history in this video, particularly with regard to the Mughals. In this article of limited length, I do not have any intention of indulging in an academic debate over history, myths and falsified history.

Double standards in historical criticism

However, I must point out the double standards, which are, under the obvious pressure of an imperious majority, being adopted in this country.

Manoj calls Humayun, Akbar and Jahangir ‘glorified dacoits’. Well, strictly speaking, he is at liberty to write his own history and interpret history in any way. I do not have any problems with his criticising or abusing Mughals, the British or whoever. The problem arises when others criticise Hindu kings or support Muslim kings, even for academic purposes, they are physically attacked and implicated under false cases usually for promoting enmity between different groups.

History is something for which we cannot have an ‘absolute’ or ‘official’ version to the exclusion of all other versions. Why should historical criticism lead to violence and registration of cases, then?

An American scholar, James Laine, had written a book titled, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India published by Oxford University Press. What followed was both amusing and alarming. Over 150 people claiming to belong to a hitherto little-known organisation called ‘Sambhaji Brigade’, affiliated to the Maratha Seva Sangh, ransacked the renowned Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI), inflicting considerable damage to the holdings of that important cultural repository, including irreplaceable and unique objects of historical and literary importance.

Reason?

Professor Laine had done some of the research for his book at BORI, and thanked the institute and some scholars affiliated with it in his acknowledgment. That was enough for those angered by the book to target the institute and attack the employees there.

Also read: Majoritarianism Has Turned the Populace Into an Ever-Ready Mob

A little over a week later, the Maharashtra government responded by registering a case against Laine and the publisher OUP under sections 153 (wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot) and 153A (promoting enmity between different groups) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) besides banning the book. All this happened because Maratha organisations saw the book as a Brahmanical conspiracy to challenge Maratha dominance, as the book had vague references connecting Shivaji’s biological origin with Kondadeo.

Out of the 72 persons who were arrested for the attack, 68 of them were acquitted in 2017 after a 13-year long trial when (quite expectedly) the prosecution failed to establish the role of the members of Sambhaji Brigade in the attack.

The remaining four had died during the trial. It needs no explanation that the police had deliberately weakened the case and left loopholes in the investigation to pander to the powerful majority. On the other hand, the OUP was obliged to withdraw the book and the publisher and author had to apologise.

Historian Audrey Truschke was severely criticised for her views on Aurangzeb in her book, Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King. Her research, in her own words, did not match the prevailing belief in India that he was “Hitler and ISIS rolled into one with a single objective: to eradicate Hindus and Hinduism”.

This portrait of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb mounted on a horse, and ready for battle, was originally produced circa 1660. Courtesy: Stanford University Press

The legal position notwithstanding

Any view against the prevalent majoritarian narrative is being treated as an offence in spite of a catena of judgments of the Supreme Court and high courts against cases on historical works including Gopal Vinayak Godse (1971), M/s Varsha Publications Pvt. Ltd. (1983), Anand Chintamani Dighe (2001), and Sujato Bhadra (2005), etc.

In Lalai Singh Yadav (1977), Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer had famously stated, “The compulsions of history and geography and the assault of modern science on the retreating forces of medieval ways — a mosaic like tapestry of lovely and unlovely strands — have made large and liberal tolerance of mutual criticism, even though expressed in intemperate diction, a necessity of life. Governments, we are confident, will not act in hubris, but will weigh these hard facts of our society while putting into operation the harsh directives for forfeiture.”

Persecution for not conforming to majoritarian narrative is imperious

In effect, it means that if someone calls the Mughals ‘glorified dacoits’, it is very much okay with the majority and is lauded. However, if you mention anything critical about a Hindu king or support a Muslim king, you invite legal trouble and physical violence.

There is a clear attempt in the country to impose majoritarian views down the throats of anyone who refuses to conform. Manoj Muntashir regrets in his video that some Muslims regard criticism of Mughals and Turks as criticism of Islam. Fact is, this is precisely what the majority does whenever Hindu kings are criticised in academic debates, and the criticism is regarded as ‘hurting the sentiments of the Hindus’.

Referring to the title of Zill-e-Ilahi (a shadow of God) of Muslim kings in the context of their alleged atrocities, Manoj says ‘Ye kaun sa Khuda hai jiski parchhaiin itni kali hai?’ (‘Who is that God whose shadow is so black?’).

I need not explain that had a similar reference would have been made with reference to any Hindu king, who also swore by his religion, there would have been a flurry of cases against the person.

Also read: To Say That an Indian Nation-State Existed in the Ancient Past Is Historical Manipulation

Leave aside academic research in history — the intolerance in the country has reached a level where people take law into their hands even for fictional depictions. In the well-known controversy over the film Padmavat, FIR was registered even before the Censor Board had issued a certification and the film was released! While in the judgment in Sanjay Leela Bhansali (2018) the filmmaker got relief from the depredations of the Rajput organisation Karni Sena, it came with a rider. Citing Prakash Jha (2011), the court said that it was the duty and obligation of the state to maintain law and order and the censor Board must keep that in mind. The Jat community had also protested against the film Panipat over the portrayal of the Jat king Surajmal.

Recently, mentioning the mass violence which took place against Muslims of Jammu during partition cost senior journalist Karan Thapar his fortnightly column ‘As I see It’ in The Asian Age. The management feared a backlash to this well-documented chapter of history that eventually led to the mass displacement of the community from the region.

The real agenda behind falsifying history

Of late, the WhatsApp University aka WhatsApp Factory of a particular party has been bombarding people with scores of messages every day, which attempt to falsify history. The general thrust of all such messages is that India had already achieved the pinnacle of technical, scientific, intellectual and cultural development before the ‘foreign invaders’ came, conquered the land and destroyed our glorious heritage. How we lost to ‘barbarians’ wielding rusted swords, our great technical developments notwithstanding, they never bother to explain.

The general allegation of the WhatsApp Factory is that hitherto the history of India was written by those Leftist or Islamist scholars who had transnational loyalties (if not outright anti-national) and hence they wanted to run the Hindus down in their love for the ‘foreigners’ and systematically brainwashed generations.

The Telegraph reported that the University Grants Commission (UGC) has drafted a history syllabus for undergraduates that focuses more on Hindu mythology and religious texts and diminishes the importance of Muslim rule. Among the readings suggested for papers, works by prominent historians such as R.S. Sharma’s book on ancient India and Irfan Habib’s book on medieval India have reportedly been dropped. The intention must be obvious.

There is a clear attempt in the country to impose majoritarian views down the throats of anyone who refuses to conform. Photo: PTI.

There is a grand design behind such falsification of history. They are aware that accusing the present-day Muslims of being ‘inherently atrocious in character’ might land them in legal trouble. But, by demonising Muslim rulers and their alleged atrocities, they indirectly imply that the present-day Muslims, claimed to be ‘inheritors of the character and values of those invaders’ are similarly demoniacal in character. This serves the purpose of deepening the communal divide and achieve the desired degree of communal polarisation for electoral benefits as well as ‘dehumanising’ of Muslims.

Also read: ‘All Indians Are Hindus’: The Modi Government’s Hush-Hush Efforts to Rewrite India’s History

The demonisation of the present-day Muslim community is sought to be ‘justified’ from the falsified tales of what their ancestors had supposedly done in the medieval age. They have been floating gory stories on the internet and WhatsApp that portray Muslims throughout medieval India and during the partition riots as compulsive sex fiends. They also cite the works of known ideologues like Koenraad Elst, V.D. Savarkar and K. S. Lal et al to lend credence to their portrayal of the ‘Muslim rapist’. A right-wing propaganda portal Postcard News linked Muslims to 96% of rapes in India and this has been repeated ad nauseam by the WhatsApp Factory in spite of the fact that it was debunked by India Today in 2018.

The video posted by Manoj Muntashir is shallow on facts and, under normal circumstances, could be ignored. However, its immense viewership shows that they have realised the great impact of theatrical delivery and powerful words in spreading venom. Even as the messages of the WhatsApp Factory were doing their job, they were desperate for someone who had a way with words and could connect instantly with the target audience with his dramatised Josh. A lyricist fits the bill well. Watch out for some more poets of the Veer Ras (martial spirit) to join their ranks.

N.C. Asthana, a retired IPS officer, has been DGP Kerala. His 49th book is titled ‘State Persecution of Minorities and Underprivileged in India’. He tweets @NcAsthana.

Away from Home, How Babur Versified His Pain of Exile and Homelessness

In ‘Baburnama’, the Mughal Emperor’s memoirs, Babur – whose birth anniversary falls on February 14 – expresses his most intimate emotions, among which is the yearning for his homeland.

In his memoir, Zahiru’d-din Muhammad Babur writes of the time when seeing a melon from his Central Asian homeland brought tears to his eyes. While it is difficult to imagine a Mughal emperor break down at the sight of fruit, Babur was not afraid of expressing his most intimate emotions. His memoirs, the Baburnama, is unparalleled in its candidness in the premodern Islamic world. In it, Babur writes of the travails of being a king, of his grief at having lost his family, of his love for Kabul’s garden parties and his infatuation for a 14-year-old boy, Baburi.

He also punctuates the political narrative with poetry that reveals his feelings with an unmatched frankness. When he sees Baburi in the Andijan Bazaar (modern-day Uzbekistan), he speaks of being ‘maddened’ and ‘afflicted’ and of walking ‘bare-hood, bare-foot, through street and lane’. Expressing his desperation, he writes:

May no person be as ravaged, lovesick and humiliated as I.

May no beloved be as pitiless and unconcerned as thou.

(Translations by Prof. Stephen F. Dale)

Babur wrote many such autobiographical poems, initially in Persian and then in Turki, which can be related to specific events in his life. Looking for literary merit, he wrote his compositions in the ghazal (poems of 6-15 lines) and the rubai (poems of two lines or four half-lines) forms — both considered the principal genres to express the ideal of courtly love in his Timurid world.

Exiled and Alone

When he was just 12, Babur inherited Ferghana from his father. The same year, his base was attacked by his Timurid and Chagatai Mongol relatives. Babur was thus forced to spend many years in exile. Constantly on the move, he longed for his homeland. He repeatedly tried to gain it back, but by 1501 he was left with no territory to call his own. The next year, he took refuge from his Uzbek enemies with his uncle in Tashkent. Here, Babur wrote of his desolation:

No one cares for a man in peril.
No one gladdens the exile’s heart.
My heart has found no joy in this exiled state.
Certainly, no one takes joy from exile.

Here, Babur makes use of the standard poetry trope of ghurbat or exile, often used to refer to one’s separation from the beloved. Lending a twist to the form, he manages to adapt the conventional romantic emotion to describe how he felt as a refugee.

Also read: Babur – the Remarkable Emperor Who Happened to Be a Muslim

Babur was also exiled multiple times during his lifetime. Sent away from Ferghana, Samarqand and his dear Kabul, the technique of using the ghurbat metaphor to describe his unfortunate circumstances marked most of his poetical career.

The loss in victory

In 1526, Babur’s luck glimmered when he conquered Hindustan from the Afghan ruler Ibrahim Lodhi. Although he finally had a territory to call his own, the victory could not shake off his feeling of alienation. If anything, being in an unfamiliar place only made him more homesick. During his days in Hindustan, as he longed for running water, melons and the sights of his homeland, poetry often became Babur’s refuge.

The emotion of alienation and isolation dominates what Prof. Stephen F. Dale, a leading scholar on Babur, has called Babur’s ‘Indian exile verses’.

Babur meeting a princess, work of Mansur, Baburnama, AD 1598, National Museum, New Delhi.

It seems like Babur realised that even after winning Agra, Kabul was where his heart lay. He writes:

I deeply desired the riches of this Indian land.
What is the profit since this land enslaves me.
Left so far from you, Babur has not perished,
Excuse me my friend for this my insufficiency.

The aggressive north Indian climate did not help alleviate Babur’s situation. He writes, ‘We were oppressed by three things in Hindustan: first by its heat, then by its strong wind and also by its dust’. We get a sense of the misery he felt in the country’s hot and dusty weather when he contrasts Hindustan’s conditions with that of Kabul in this ghazal:

O those who left the country of India,
Talking about its misery and distress,
Remembering Kabul and its lovely climate
You ardently left India, that furnace.

Babur’s companions also felt the same discomfort in the northern plains of Hindustan. Despite having scored another tough victory over Rana Sanga in the Battle of Kanwah in early 1527, many left for Afghanistan in May or June of the same year.

As a nomadic emperor, who had spent his life traversing tough terrains in dismal conditions, Babur must have become very close to his small group of men. When they deserted him in Hindustan, he clearly became distraught. By 1528, as Babur became older and lonelier, this distress had taken on shades of hopelessness:

Finally neither friends nor companions will be faithful.
Neither summer and winter nor companions will remain.
A hundred pities that precious life passes away.
O, alas, that this celebrated time is futile.

With time, Babur’s health also started to deteriorate. In October 1527, he suffered a bout of dysentery. In 1530, he fell seriously ill once again and died in the December of the same year. After being temporarily buried in Agra, he was put to rest according to his wishes, in Kabul. His simple tomb overlooking the scenery of one of his dearest cities was a sight he might have approved of.

When Babur inherited Ferghana from his father, his family was living in unfortunate circumstances. But by the time of his death, he had done much to revive the glory of the Timurids. Foremost among them was laying the foundation of the Timurid-Mughal empire in India. However, this came at a cost.

Pushed out of his homeland and exiled multiple times, Babur was forced to spend much of his life in unfamiliar places. Miles away from his beloved homeland, poetry, like for many of us, became his way to voice his inner feelings and perhaps seek refuge in memories of days past.

This article is part of Saha Sutra, on www.sahapedia.org, an online resource for Indian arts, culture and heritage.

Reading Qurratulain Hyder’s ‘Aag Ka Darya’ in Contemporary India

Written in a tumultuous Pakistan of the 1950s, the novel is more relevant to present-day India than ever before.

In Pakistan, after Muhammad Ali Jinnah died in 1948, the establishment began to deprive its citizens of a syncretic past where Hindus and Sikhs lived alongside Muslims. Even before martial law was imposed in 1958, Muhammad Bin Qasim – an eighth-century Arab commander – had been christened as the early founder of Pakistan for discovering the first “Islamic” province of South Asia – Sindh. Expectedly, Sindh’s syncretic Sufi tradition was considered merely an afterthought in this state-sponsored version of history.

A similar attempt at undermining the syncretic past is underway in India. The labyrinth that is the history of India is not only extensive and rich but also highly contested today. From hyper-nationalistic films to ‘WhatsApp Universities’ that produce false histories, the idea of India is being punctured and inflated with ‘alternative’ narratives.

In the past five years, several fringe, as well as mainstream elements have attempted to physically and intellectually bludgeon any aspect of India’s Muslim heritage. The reading down of Articles 370 and 35A, which gave Jammu and Kashmir its special status, was deliberately aimed at purging the state of its unique (multi-)ethnic identity – which is overwhelmingly Muslim.

Even as governments aggressively alter history or assert alternative narratives to suit their ideologies, literary writers bear the torch of debunking these narratives from bygone eras and bringing truth to the fore.

Qurratulain Hyder’s Aag Ka Darya (self-translated in 1998 as River of Fire) is an example of one such account.

Also read: A People Ravaged: Peeling off the Many Layers of Partition Trauma

Qurratulain Hyder
Aag Ka Dariya (River of Fire)
Women Unlimited, 2003

Born in Aligarh in 1927, Hyder migrated to Pakistan in 1947. But just a few years later, after Aag Ka Darya was published, Hyder returned to India, where she was welcomed with open arms by none other than Jawaharlal Nehru and Maulana Azad. Her debut novel, Mere Bhi Sanam Khaane (My Temples), examined the causes of Hindu-Muslim violence that led to the partition of India.

Ainee Apa – as she was endearingly referred to by her readers – dealt with the aftermath of such communal discord in her next novel Safina-e-Gham-e-Dil (Boat of Sorrow). When the military and religious fundamentalists tightened their grip on Pakistan, in 1958, Ainee Apa gifted her third novel, Aag Ka Darya, to the Urdu literary world. This was at a time when the Pakistani establishment was systematically cleansing the country’s ethos of any traces of Hindu (thereby Indian) traditions, which earlier existed alongside the Islamic ones.

Aag Ka Darya transcended revisionism by blending the mammoth task of chronicling the Indian subcontinent’s history with witty and fictional prose. The novel spanned historical periods from the Mauryan Empire, the end of the Lodhi dynasty, the start of the Mughal rule, the British Raj to the partition of India. It contains recurring characters with similar names and cyclical occurrences that establish continuity.

It exudes the same cadence through which Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude reimagined Colombia’s history through the repetition of core dramatis personae and watershed events. Each of the epochs constitutes the backdrops that shape these characters’ actions, their interactions with each other, and their individual trajectories.

Abul Kalaam, professor of Urdu at Maulana Azad National Urdu University and an acquaintance of Hyder, considered the book to be the third part of a trilogy. “She saw how the violence played out in 1947. Therefore, Apa’s first two masterpieces were her ways of purging herself of the partition memories that weighed heavily on her,” he said.

Also read: The Question of Identity, Captured by the Pakistani English Novel

Unlike the first two parts of this unofficial trilogy, Aag Ka Darya did not delve too much into the circumstances that destroyed the Hindu-Muslim unity. Kalaam elaborated and said, “Aag Ka Darya chronicles how the cultures of Hindus and Muslims amalgamated to form the syncretic ethos of a land called ‘Hind’”.

Today, with the majority and minority populations being polarised through their religious identities and national registers deciding whether someone is truly Indian or not, the theme of belonging to a nation hits close to home. Ironically, present-day Muslims are conflated with certain Muslim rulers and their excesses on the “native” Hindu.

Qurratulain Hyder. Photo: Dawn

A memorable character that symbolises this nuanced view about the Muslim rulers’ contributions to India is a half-Middle Eastern, half-Persian man named Kamal. Before being supplanted by the Lodhi regime, the Jaunpur Sultanate tasks Kamal with translating Hindu spiritual texts into Persian. To do so, he first learns Sanskrit. Even after Kamal’s Jaunpaur Sultanate masters are ousted by the Lodhis, he further naturalises himself into his adopted land by marrying a lower-caste Hindu and learning other indigenous languages like Bengali and Awadhi.

With the end of colonial rule, in the land that was once a fertile ground for syncretism, the colonially implanted ideas of a Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan have materialised. Even when a totally ‘Hinduised’ country did not seem like a possibility in 1947 to some, Kamal was loyal to India despite the pro-Pakistan Muslim League influences around him. Yet, it were those seeds of hatred that rendered him unemployable as a Muslim despite his superb qualifications.

Juxtaposed against another recurring British character, Cyril, Kamal is anything but an exploitative coloniser. During the British era, Cyril is the quintessential ‘civiliser’ of the natives. He undertakes multiple affairs with many native women whom he views as exotic and lures with false promises of marriage. Another one of his incarnations, in the post-independence epoch, can’t even stay loyal to his wife. Commenting on her nuance, Kalaam states, “Throughout her repertoire, she never excessively extolled the pleasant or unsavoury aspects of any historical period of the subcontinent.”

Also read: After Partition, Trust was the Biggest Loss in Sindh

Unfortunately, such balanced retellings of ancient times are being stifled. Hence, “Who controls the past controls the future” is not just an Orwellian warning. Rather, it seems like a revisionist tactic from the playbook of the powers that be. “Be it the Vedic or Mughal timelines in Aag Ka Darya, while acknowledging the negative, readers are attuned of the positive aspects of both phases,” Kalaam says.

At a time when the country’s history and constitution are being rewritten, Aag Ka Darya remains a potent reminder of the epochs that have shaped and shattered India since the fourth century BC.

Daneesh Majid is a freelance writer on South Asian culture and security with a masters in South Asian area studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Painting a Talking Portrait of Old Delhi

Rana Safvi’s ‘City of My Heart’ talks about how an assortment of festivals and occasions were celebrated and commemorated in Old Delhi, especially by its Mughal rulers.

Around the holiday season, one wonders what some of our traditional celebrations in South Asia were like a few hundred years ago and how they were chronicled, if at all. One can find dozens of texts ranging from classical fiction pieces like A Christmas Carol to non-fiction works on European and American celebrations.

But one would be hard-pressed to find accounts of Dussehra or Eid in print. I, for example, grew up celebrating the Persian/Afghan new year – the Nowruz – in Peshawar, but can’t think of a written work that chronicles in detail how the day was celebrated. It was, therefore, unadulterated joy to read the historian Rana Safvi’s latest book, City of My Heart, which talks about how an assortment of festivals and occasions were celebrated and commemorated in Old Delhi, especially by its Mughal rulers.

Rana Safvi
City of my Heart
Hachette India, 2018

City of My Heart is a translation of four Urdu accounts of life in the final days of Muslim rule in Delhi i.e. Dilli ka Aakhiri Deedar (The Last Glimpse of Delhi) by Syed Wazir Hasan Dehlvi; Bazm-e-Aakhir (The Last Assembly) by Munshi Faizuddin; Qila-e-Mu’alla ki Jhalkiya’n (Glimpses of the Exalted Fort) by Arsh Taimuri and Begamat ke Aansu (Tears of the Begums) by Khwaja Hasan Nizami.

The author’s previous book, The Forgotten Cities of Delhi, tracked the various cantonments and royal expansions, such as the Lal Kot in Mehrauli, Tughlaqabad, Jahanpanah, Ferozabad, Deenpanah and Shahjahanabad. These monuments were established by various rulers and perished or thrived depending upon the monarch’s whim, mother nature’s blessings or its ire and the invaders’ onslaught or successful fortification against it.

The current work supplements its antecedent in that if those walls and structures could talk, they would tell stories of the life and times of those living within their confines. The god of Urdu poetry, Mir Taqi Mir, had once said:

“Dilli ke na the kooche auraaq-e-musavvir they
jo shakl nazar aaee tasveer nazar aaee”

(The streets of Delhi weren’t mere streets; they were pages of a pictorial book in which one saw a face and picture (of the city and its culture).

Every Dehlvi character, picture and event speaks to the reader and tells the story of the culture that flourished in the cities of Old Delhi. Another quintessential Dehlvi, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, had once written to a friend about what really constituted the old city:

“The life of Delhi was constituted by many displays: The Red Fort, Chandni Chowk, the daily bustle at the Jama Masjid, the weekly excursion over the Jamuna bridge, the annual fair at the Phool Waalon ki Sair; now that these five things are gone, Delhi isn’t Delhi. May be a city of this name existed in India (but doesn’t anymore) …”

Safvi’s work is a narrative recount of precisely these events, the people celebrating them and more.

While the narratives of the elaborate celebration of the Holi, Divali, Eid, Phool Waalon ki Sair and so on, are the leitmotif of the book, what really stands out is the description of the syncretic and composite culture of the era and how various religious denominations came together in celebrating and suffering.

Also read: A City or a Capital? The Trouble With New Delhi’s Identity

One episode recounted in the book is particularly poignant. One of the Mughal rulers of Delhi, Alamgir the Second, was lured to Feroz Shah Kotla – where he was then killed and dumped by his vizier on the banks of Jamuna. Incidentally, a Hindu lady, Ram Kumari, who had previously gotten a glimpse of the king in one of his public viewings – Jharoka Darshan – spotted his corpse. She held on to the dead body till the royal troops arrived and retrieved it. The woman was subsequently honoured by the king’s successor and would tie the Raksha Bandhan knot on the new king’s hands. The tradition continued with the descendants of both Ram Kumari and the Mughals and came to be known as the ‘Salona’, which apparently is still the title for it, in parts of Haryana and Delhi.

As someone of Afghan descent, it was particularly interesting to find names of the signature Afghan/central Asian dishes such as Aash and Borani on the royal Mughal menu. The narration of egg-fighting on Nowruz revived the memories a game which was once played in my hometown Peshawar on the spring equinox.

Safvi records the celebration as thus: “In the afternoon, all the begums and princes gather to fulfil the omen of the fan. They throw fistfuls of gold and silver coins in the air, a tradition on Nauroz. In the evenings, all the salateen males come to the Diwan-e-Khas with Sabzwar hen eggs scented in musk and saffron. The Badshah sits on his masnad and now the egg fight begins. One salateen takes an egg in his hand and hides it, leaving only the tip exposed. A second salateen tries to aim at it with another egg. When the egg breaks, his supporters start celebrating, ‘He has cracked it!'”

Rana Safvi has brought to life not only the eight – but 14 (by her count) – cities of Delhi, and also the people, culture and language(s) they spoke. Syed Wazir Hasan, Munshi Faizuddin, Arsh Taimuri and Khwaja Hasan Nizami are among the writers who saw and recorded the final days of the Mughal period – in intricate detail. The Urdu prose they wrote is extremely rich in idiom and nomenclature, translating which requires both finesse and understanding of the people, places and the civilisation they garnered.

Also read: The Languages of Delhi – A Microcosm of India’s Diversity

Safvi has shown a flair for translation that keeps the letter and spirit of the originals alive. While those of us who can read Urdu have partaken from the rich repertoire of these four chroniclers, those who can’t have been missing out on the fantastic narrative these fine writers had produced. Safvi has saved for posterity, not just the works of the four authors she translated, but also the culture they speak of.

I am of the view that while the translations are meant for a broad readership, they are best enjoyed by those who know both the language of origin and the translation. Those of us who have read Hasan, Faizuddin, Taimuri and Nizami would be doubly enthralled by Safvi’s accuracy in diction and context. She has truly preserved the essence of the four books she ventured to revive.

Someone said about the perils of translation – and love– that when it is faithful it is not fun. I have no qualms in saying that in her love of Delhi, its people and its culture, Rana Safvi has been both faithful and fun!

Mohammad Taqi is a Pakistan-American columnist. He tweets @mazdaki.