The Fountain in the Moonlight Square

One year ago the Taliban quit Kabul, heading south before the forces of

the Northern Alliance and American Special Forces. Tonight Virginia will

execute Mir Amal Kazi, the Pakistani who gunned down five CIA employees

as they waited at the red light on Route 123 outside the main gate. Last

month I found myself in Delhi, at the end of the Great Northern Trunk

Road that leads from Pakistan to the town the British made capital of

all India. Many people have come down that road to this town, some

angry, many with the determination to leave their mark on this place.

The Mughals came from that direction. Kabul is only a couple hundred

clicks upslope.  They say there are seven cities of Dehli, eight, if you

count the one we were standing in, left behind when the Colonialists

decamped.

The Lahore Gate of the Lal Qila- the Delhi Red Fort- is part of the

seventh city of Delhi, and we were in front of it. It is an imposing

structure, rising out of red sandstone walls with turrets and flagpoles.

The Mughuls designed it to impress, to intimidate. The Brits tinkered

with it, but as with so many things here, they adopted the best and

gilded the lily. The Fort is part of the seventh of the eight cities

that have sequentially occupied this plain by the Yamuna River. The gate

issues out into the great teeming bazaar of Chandni Chowk. In Hindi it

means “the moonlit silvery square,” and it was, once. I don’t know what

phase the moon is in today, but is not shining on  Chandni now. It is a

mess, and we were headed into it on the back of bicycle rickshaws.

This is supposed to be one of the great adventures in this incarnation

of an ancient city. I held my breath as we crossed Netaji Subhash Marg,

the chaotic boulevard that fronts the dry moat before the Red Fort. The

sky was bright blue and the air was alive with sound and smell. I was

jet lagged and my nerves were rubbed raw by the near misses.

Let me fix you in time, here amidst the confusion and bus fumes. Hold

your breath with me. I will try to stitch this together in a single

paragraph.

The Aryan tribes who lived by the river adopted Hinduism and ruled the

original inhabitants who have lived here since at least 2500BC. They

left some of the great epics of Hindu literature, the gitas of Ramayama

and the Mahahharata , forming  the cultural bedrock of India. In the

first and second centuries this was the center of a great Buddhist

empire, ruled from what is now Pakistan. They left behind the gigantic

Buddhas in Afghanistan that the Taliban blew up before the world changed

last year. The Buddhists were supplanted by the Rajputs, some of their

forts surviving, and their brand of Hinduism was in turn influenced by

the bhakti movement, stressing the need for a personal god. The Krishna

cult answered the call in the 13th century, just in time for the Rajputs

to be overwhelmed by the sword of  Islam arriving from the hills of the

north. That would be 1192, when Qutbuddin Aibak established his Islamic

kingdom on the great plain. In the 1500s the Mughals arrived, and three

hundred years of Indo-Islamic fusion began. The Mughal Emperors brought

spectacle and majesty and a sort of peace and a sort of tranquility to

the ancient land. There was a flowering of architecture and art and

Hindu temples were ripped down to build the glittering mosques. The

Peacock throne stood above the audience yard of the Red Fort and the

Mughal Emperor was serene, ruler of all the world. Decorations on this

ceiling came from Italy and supplicants on his audience floor came from

all across the sub-continent.

There is more, of course, but I have but one breath to tell it. The last

of the Mughals was Bahadur Shah Zafar. The glory that had been the Red

Fort had faded. The old Shah was a puppet, propped up by the East India

Company. Bahadar enjoyed his poetry, and his Pearl Mosque, and the River

of Paradise that divided the Imperial apartment, and the remembrance of

things that had been.

The Red Fort was at our back as we plunged into the Chandni Chowk.

People swarm as dense as bugs here. The Chandni Chowk was once the royal

shopping arcade, serving the Emperor on his Peacock Throne, and his

wives and his court. It had a canal down the middle and was bordered

with decorative trees and grand residences were sheltered by the trees.

It was laid out in 1648 by Jahanara Begum, Shah Jahan’s favorite

daughter. The Shah drew a lot of water here, and accordingly his Delhi

was named Shahjahanabad. There is a print of the scene as it looked

before the Mutiny hanging on a first-floor wall of the Imperial Hotel.

It is tranquil and serene, colors muted in the old watercolor. The last

Mughal Emperor was Bahadur Shah Zafar, wh left here in 1858. I’ll get

back to him in a moment. Many of the buildings remain, though the fronts

are shabby shops and the sidewalks occupied with peddlers and trash. The

trees and the canal are long gone. It is most definitely not elegant

this morning, as we proceed up the mobbed street toward the twin spires

of the Fatehpuri Mosque. The crowd swirls around us: Sikhs in turbans,

Hindus in ties, Muslim tribesmen from the hills, Tibetans and dark

southerners, all part of the rich mosaic of the crossroads of Northern

India.

It is hard to imagine it as it was amidst all the confusion. This day is

sunny, not blazing hot, nice for October in the north of the

Sub-continent. My pedal rickshaw is following in loose convoy behind my

associates. We successfully crossed had set out from the Lahore Gate

where the Prime Minister addresses the crowds on New Year’s Day. On this

day, with the Hindu festival of lights coming hard upon us, there is a

frenzy of shopping. A faux Taj Mahal was erected in the forecourt of the

Red Fort. I thought we looked ridiculous perched in he rickshaws,

sitting up tall, needing only pith helmets to complete the picture of

complacent Westerners. I was surprised. We rarely got a glance.

Our drivers stopped unbidden at the beginning of the block. Only one of

the drivers spoke decent enough English to communicate with us. We

visited the famous Jain bird hospital, located in a temple where we had

to remove our shoes We were ushered into the precincts of the temple and

up the narrow stairs into the hospital where thousands of birds were

held in cages. Our shoes were outside and we walked the galleries in

stocking feet, the floors semi-clean. It was weird and impressive and

the air was close. We watched the surgeon bandage the wing of a wounded

sparrow. Hawks were there, and songbirds, and thousands of injured

pigeons. Mostly injured in collisions with ceiling fans, the attendants

told us. I burned the socks later.

One of the tenets of the Jain faith is a concern for all living beings,

so they did not leave empires and forts behind them, only temples. I

talked to our Nepalese interlocutor as we walked back toward the

rickshaws. His American ball cap was pulled down tight over his

impassive face. I asked him if he had heard of the Bob Segar song “I

think I’m going to Kathmandu” and he said he had. Then back in the

rickshaws and up the main drag past the Svetambara Jain Temple on the

left and the cinema to the right, equally worthy of note. My driver was

dark and wiry and he would gesture and speak unintelligibly over his

shoulder. I rarely could understand what he said, but I had read the

guidebook and had a general idea of what he was pointing out. He

gestured at the Sisganj Gurudwara temple on the left, where the ninth

Sikh guru was beheaded. From the roof of a nearby mosque in 1739 the

Persian Chief Nadir Shah watched his men slaughter nearly 30,000

residents of this district.

My guide did not note the vast cream-colored colonial Town Hall on the

right, or the bronze statue of the fakir who had sat in a chair in front

of it for thirty years. He did not note the police station on the

teeming square, nor mention the iron Victorian-era fountain that stands

in the middle of it. Once it had the filigree of the age in relief,

stolid black. Now it is painted a garish bright-blue-and-white in

vertical alternating stripes. The fountain is special, insignificant in

this modern throng, but in its day had been the center of this world.

The man who made it so was Major W.S.R. Hodson. There are at least two

versions of him. One is a sepia-toned  Victorian portrait of an earnest

and heroic English gentleman, striving to do his best in unsettled and

dangerous times. The etchings of the time show him in crisp khakis under

a solar topee, insulated against the blazing sun. That is also the

Hodson depicted on his tomb at Litchfield Cathedral in green England. He

is among the pantheon of Empire heroes, darling of the penny press, the

agent of muscular Western civilization among the unwashed heathens.

Hodson made the garish fountain in the moonlight square the center of a

world and the beginning of a unified India. The Hodson I was thinking of

had a different aspect, a manifestation of fury in soiled wrinkled

uniform. This Hodson wore a fez as red as the rims of his eyes, fatigued

from the wild ride down the Great Trunk road to Delhi with General

Nicholson. The rickshaw kept moving without comment.

I twisted to look back at the fountain as we kept moving up the crowded

street, jammed in a mass of rickshaws, a moving heaving throng, and up

to the great mosque that guards the end of the street. We dismounted and

followed our guide under the awnings and along the narrow sidewalks of

the Khari Baoli, the largest spice market in Asia. Goods spilled out

into the street and vendors ground crimson betel to a paste and red

splotches marked the expectorant on the street. Everywhere there was

motion and I kept my camera pressed to my side, trying not to lose track

of my companions. We darted into a dark stairwell and began to wheeze

from the pungent scent of cardamom and chilies and cumin and ginger all

ground into fine powder. Men were coming and going in the darkness with

great bags of saffron and on their shoulders.

Coughing and wheezing in the dark, the smell of the spice was an

oppressive physical presence. Our guides gestured us up narrow stairs

and it became black, claustrophobic. I was thinking this was unwise,

suddenly remembering the war too near. Richard Perle was grabbed like

this, I thought. Maybe this was a set-up? Part of a general uprising

against the West? Suddenly we emerged on a balcony over the courtyard,

looking down at the panorama of commerce, spices drying on flat roofs,

people bathing and cooking, life happening all around and on each level.

Then three more narrow staircases and we were on the roof. Our guide

said the building was two hundred years old. Great dented aluminum

kettles stood on propane rings in rooms with open walls, kitchens for

the workers below. Trash and plates littered the surface. The view over

the parapet was extraordinary. I looked down on the river of humanity

surging from the Red Fort up into the market district, coursing through

the narrow streets like blood through an artery.

The roof where we stood was fifty years old when the Sepoys, the East

India company soldiers, rose against their masters. The official

commencement is enshrined as the 10th of May, 1857, but unrest had been

simmering even before the Company deposed the Nawab and annexed the

province of Oudh the year before. Strange portents were observed in the

country. Chupatis, small loaves of unleavened bread, were sent from

village to village in the night. People began to talk of a rising

against the English. The ostensible reason for he Mutiny was the

introduction of the sealed cartridge for the new Enfield rifle. Muslims

told one another that the cartridges were waterproofed with pork-fat.

Hindus whispered that it was beef tallow. The cartridge was a plot to

defile their faith or break their caste. The British, focused inward on

life in their cantonments, were blissfully unaware.

When the storm broke, was terrible in its fury. The Sepoys killed the

Europeans they found, and surrounded those fast enough to get to their

weapons. Rebels swarmed into the Mughal capital and entreated the

Emperor to lead them against the Company. Bahadur reluctantly agreed.

Delhi rose, and part of the fa�ade of the Delhi magazine is preserved in

the median of bustling Lothian Road. The British blew it up as they fled

the city. The telegraphers signaled the revolt from a position just to

the north, near the old General Post Office. The women and children of

the garrison fled up the Ridge, and waited for relief that never came.

Other settlements overrun or surrounded.  It was summer in north India.

At the Residence Lucknow, the beleaguered Europeans endured temperatures

that soared to 130 degrees. The epic of that siege is captured in

Imperial legend and on etchings hanging on the second floor of the

Imperial Hotel. The garrison at Cawnpore did not hold out. The men, all

but three, were killed in the river and the women and children chopped

up by Hallal butchers and thrown down a well.

The Indian Government has been remarkably good about the destruction of

the monuments of the Raj. But they made an exception about the Well at

Cawnpore.  After Independence the marble angel upon it was quietly

removed, and the Well paved over without a trace.

Most of the subcontinent did not rise, but the nearest garrisons

remaining in British hands were far to the northwest, toward Lahore.

Thirty-five-year-old General John Nicholson organized the Punjab Relief

Column and they swept down the Great Trunk Road at twenty-seven miles a

day. They came ferocious and angry, and the wild-eyed Calvary swept up

the street below me past the Chandni Chowk fountain to the elaborate

Lahore Gate. They found it unguarded. Only a few Sepoys remained within

the precincts of the Fort and they killed them in a perfunctory manner.

That night the officers dined in the Diwan-i-Khas, the enclosure of the

Peacock Throne.

The Relief Column joined with the troops who remained on the Ridge north

of the City. A week of fighting crushed the rebels and the British were

triumphant. General Nicholson was killed in the moment of his triumph at

the Kashmir Gate, near St James Church, the oldest in Delhi. Hodson was

empowered as intelligence chief. His task was to find Bahadur Shah Zafar

and bring him into Her Majesty’s custody.

Humanyun’s Tomb was where the old Emperor was hiding. It is a mile or so

south of the Red Fort, also on the river. I could almost make it out

from the roof of the Khari Baoli.  It is hard to call the place a

“tomb,” rather it is a complex of them under one roof. It was

commissioned five hundred years ago by Humanyan’s senior wife, who

wished to suitably memorialize the second Mughal Emperor. It was

designed by the Persian architect Mirak Mirza Ghiyas. The graceful dome

of the mausoleum is the model from which several more were built,

including the magnificent Taj Mahal. The number of royals interred in

the complex has earned the Tomb the nickname of :The dormitory of the

house of Timur.” Even the Emperor’s barber has a place of rest. It is an

extraordinary structure, cool marble, with intricately carved trellis

work.

When they discovered where the Emperor had gone, Hodson took fifty of

his wild horsemen, all in a motly of sashes and cummerbunds and turbans,

beards and sabers and tall boots. They  rode pell-mell through the

streets, heedless of the refugees and the bullock carts attempting to

flee the violence. They pulled up in the forecourt of the garden tomb,

hooves clattering and the horses breathing hard.

Jan Morris describes the scene like this: “One can almost see now in the

great dusty square, half an Englishman, half a Sikh, dusty, lithe,

ardent, dressed in the haphazard flamboyance dear to irregular

cavalrymen down the centuries, the son of the Archdeacon of Lichfield

awaiting the submission of the last of the Mughals.”

Hodson had sworn not to kill the Emperor, thought he did tell the old

man on his palanquin that if there was a rescue attempt he would be shot

down like a dog. He was as good as his word on that. After all, Bahadur

had only been lapdog of the East India Company, then a symbolic

lightning rod for the rebels. Hodson had the emaciated Emperor borne

through the Chandni Chowk to the Lahore Gate. The British held him with

part of his harem in a small cell in the Red Fort, and for months after

the last Mughal was a popular tourist attraction. He died a few years

later, exiled to Burma.

Hodson had made no promise to preserve the dynasty. He returned to the

tomb the next day and arrested Bahadur’s heirs, two handsome young men

who represented the future of the Mughals. On their way to the Red Fort,

Hodson ordered them from their cart and stripped to their loincloths. He

then borrowed a carbine from one of his men, and with great display

before the crowd in the Chandni Chowk, personally shot them dead.. The

corpses were dragged to the Silvery Moonlight Square and placed on

display on the fountain. Morris says they remained there until the

stench was too overpowering and they were buried in the interest of the

public health.

Copyright 2002 Vic Socotra

Notes on Hodson assisted by:

Jan Morris, An Imperial Procession, Vol 1, “Heavens Command”

Hodson-Pressinger, Selwyn, ‘Hodson’s Memorial in Lichfield Cathedral’,

Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, LXXX, no. 321,

Spring 2002, pp. 70-2.

Short note (with one illus.) on the monument (designed by G.E. Street)

to Major W.S.R Hodson of Hodson’s Horse (d. 1858) following its recent

restoration at the expense of the Hodson Horse Officers’ Association.

Flanking the monument and added some years later are lances from the

10th Bengal Lancers (Hodson’s Horse) and the Queen’s Own Corps of

Guides, and in 1946 the Lucknow Residency Union Jack was added.