Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official

CHAPTER 67

On the 21st we went on eight miles to the Kutb Mīnār, across the range of sandstone hills, which rise to the height of about two hundred feet, and run north and south. The rocks are for the most part naked, but here and there the soil between them is covered with famished grass, and a few stunted shrubs; anything more unprepossessing can hardly be conceived than the aspect of these hills, which seem to serve no other purpose than to store up heat for the people of the great city of Delhi. We passed through a cut in this range of hills, made apparently by the stream of the river Jumna at some remote period, and about one hundred yards wide at the entrance. This cut is crossed by an enormous stone wall running north and south, and intended to shut in the waters, and form a lake in the opening beyond it. Along the brow of the precipice, overlooking the northern end of the wall, is the stupendous fort of Tughlakābād, built by the Emperor Tughlak the First853 of the sandstones of the range of hills on which it stands, cut into enormous square blocks.854

On the brow of the opposite side of the precipice, overlooking the southern end of the wall, stands the fort of Muhammadābād, built by this Emperor's son and successor, Muhammad, and resembling in all things that built by his father.855 These fortresses overlooked the lake, with the old city of Delhi spread out on the opposite side of it to the west. There is a third fortress upon an isolated hill, east of the great barrier wall, said to have been built in honour of his master by the Emperor Tughlak's barber.856 The Emperor's tomb stands upon an isolated rock in the middle of the once lake, now plain, about a mile to the west of the barrier wall. The rock is connected with the western extremity of the northern fortress by a causeway of twenty- five arches, and about one hundred and fifty yards long. This is a fine tomb, and contains in a square centre room the remains of the Emperor Tughlak, his wife, and his son. The tomb is built of red sandstone, and surmounted by a dome of white marble. The three graves inside are built of brick covered with stucco work. The outer sides of the tomb slope slightly inwards from the base, in the form of a pyramid; but the inner walls are, of course, perpendicular.857

The impression left on the mind after going over these stupendous fortifications is that the arts which contribute to the comforts and elegancies of life must have been in a very rude state when they were raised. Domestic architecture must have been wretched in the extreme. The buildings are all of stone, and almost all without cement, and seem to have been raised by giants, and for giants, whose arms were against everybody, and everybody's arm against them. This was indeed the state of the Pathān sovereigns in India—they were the creatures of their armies; and their armies were also employed against the people, who feared and detested them all.858

The Emperor Tughlak, on his return at the head of the army, which he had led into Bengal to chastise some rebellious subjects, was met at Afghānpur by his eldest son, Jūnā, whom he had left in the government of the capital. The prince had in three days raised here a palace of wood for a grand entertainment to do honour to his father's return; and when the Emperor signified his wish to retire, all the courtiers rushed out before him to be in attendance, and among the rest, Jūnā himself. Five attendants only remained when the Emperor rose from his seat, and at that moment the building fell in and crushed them and their master. Jūnā had been sent at the head of an army into the Deccan, where he collected immense wealth from the plunder of the palaces of princes and the temples of their priests, the only places in which much wealth was to be found in those days. This wealth he tried to conceal from his father, whose death he probably thus contrived, that he might the sooner have the free enjoyment of it with unlimited power.859

Only thirty years before, Alā-ud-dīn, returning in the same manner at the head of an army from the Deccan loaded with wealth, murdered the Emperor Fīrōz the Second, the father of his wife, and ascended the throne.860 Jūnā ascended the throne under the name of Muhammad the Third;861 and, after the remains of his father had been deposited in the tomb I have described, he passed in great pomp and splendour from the fortress of Tughlakābād, which his father had just then completed, to the city in which the Mīnār stands, with elephants before and behind loaded with gold and silver coins, which were scattered among the crowd, who everywhere hailed him with shouts of joy. The roads were covered with flowers, the houses adorned with the richest stuffs, and the streets resounded with music.

He was a man of great learning, and a great patron of learned men; he was a great founder of churches, had prayers read in them at the prescribed times, and always went to prayers five times a day himself.862 He was rigidly temperate himself in his habits, and discouraged all intemperance in others. These things secured him panegyrists throughout the empire during the twenty-seven years that he reigned over it, though perhaps he was the most detestable tyrant that ever filled a throne. He would take his armies out over the most populous and peaceful districts, and hunt down the innocent and unoffending people like wild beasts, and bring home their heads by thousands to hang them on the city gates for his mere amusement. He twice made the whole people of the city of Delhi emigrate with him to Daulatābād in Southern India, which he wished to make the capital, from some foolish fancy; and during the whole of his reign gave evident signs of being in an unsound state of mind.863 There was at the time of his father's death a saint at Delhi named Nizāmuddīn Aulia, or the Saint, who was supposed by supernatural means to have driven from Delhi one night in a panic a large army of Moghals under Tarmasharīn, who invaded India from Transoxiana in 1303, and laid close siege to the city of Delhi, in which the Emperor Alā-ud-dīn was shut up without troops to defend himself, his armies being engaged in Southern India.864 It is very likely that he did strike this army with a panic by getting some of their leaders assassinated in one night. He was supposed to have the 'dast ul ghaib', or supernatural purse' [literally, 'invisible hand'], as his private expenditure is said to have been more lavish even than that of the Emperor himself, while he had no ostensible source of income whatever. The Emperor was either jealous of his influence and display, or suspected him of dark crimes, and threatened to humble him when he returned to Delhi. As he approached the city, the friends of the saint, knowing the resolute spirit of the Emperor, urged him to quit the capital, as he had been often heard to say, 'Let me but reach Delhi, and this proud priest shall be humbled'.

The only reply that the saint would ever deign to give from the time the imperial army left Bengal, till it was within one stage of the capital, was 'Dihlī dūr ast'; 'Delhi is still far off'. This is now become a proverb over the East equivalent to our 'There is many a slip between the cup and the lip'. It is probable that the saint had some understanding with the son in his plans for the murder of his father; it is possible that his numerous wandering disciples may in reality have been murderers and robbers, and that he could at any time have procured through them the assassination of the Emperor. The Muhammadan Thugs, or assassins of India, certainly looked upon him as one of the great founders of their system, and used to make pilgrimages to his tomb as such; and, as he came originally from Persia, and is considered by his greatest admirers to have been in his youth a robber, it is not impossible that he may have been originally one of the 'assassins', or disciples of the 'old man of the mountains', and that he may have set up the system of Thuggee in India and derived a great portion of his income from it.865 Emperors now prostrate themselves, and aspire to have their bones placed near it [scil. the tomb]. While wandering about the ruins, I remarked to one of the learned men of the place who attended us that it was singular Tughlak's buildings should be so rude compared with those of Iltutmish, who had reigned more than eighty years before him.866 'Not at all singular,' said he, 'was he not under the curse of the holy saint Nizām-ud-dīn?' 'And what had the Emperor done to merit the holy man's curse?' 'He had taken by force to employ upon his palaces several of the masons whom the holy man was employing upon a church,' said he.

The Kutb Mīnār was, I think, more beyond my expectations than the Tāj; first, because I had heard less of it; and secondly, because it stands as it were alone in India—there is absolutely no other tower in this Indian empire of ours.867

Large pillars have been cut out of single stones, and raised in different parts of India to commemorate the conquests of Hindoo princes, whose names no one was able to discover for several centuries, till an unpretending English gentleman of surprising talents and industry, Mr. James Prinsep, lately brought them to light by mastering the obsolete characters in which they and their deeds had been inscribed upon them.868 These pillars would, however, be utterly insignificant were they composed of many stones. The knowledge that they are cut out of single stones, brought from a distant mountain, and raised by the united efforts of multitudes when the mechanical arts were in a rude state, makes us still view them with admiration.869 But the single majesty of this Mīnār of Kutb-ud-dīn, so grandly conceived, so beautifully proportioned, so chastely embellished, and so exquisitely finished, fills the mind of the spectator with emotions of wonder and delight; without any such aid, he feels that it is among the towers of the earth what the Tāj is among the tombs—something unique of its kind that must ever stand alone in his recollections.870

It is said to have taken forty-four years in building, and formed the left of two 'mīnārs' of a mosque. The other 'mīnār' was never raised, but this has been preserved and repaired by the liberality of the British Government.871 It is only 242 feet high, and 106 feet in circumference at the base. It is circular, and fluted vertically into twenty-seven semicircular and angular divisions. There are four balconies, supported upon large stone brackets, and surrounded with battlements of richly cut stone, to enable people to walk round the tower with safety. The first is ninety feet from the base, the second fifty feet further up, the third forty further; and the fourth twenty-four feet above the third. Up to the third balcony, the tower is built of fine, but somewhat ferruginous sandstone, whose surface has become red from exposure to the oxygen of the atmosphere. Up to the first balcony, the flutings are alternately semicircular and angular; in the second story they are all semicircular, and in the third all angular. From the third balcony to the top, the building is composed chiefly of white marble; and the surface is without the deep flutings. Around the first story there are five horizontal belts of passages from the Korān, engraved in bold relief, and in the Kufic character. In the second story there are four, and in the third three. The ascent is by a spiral staircase within, of three hundred and eighty steps; and there are passages from this staircase to the balconies, with others here and there for the admission of light and air.872

A foolish notion has prevailed among some people, over-fond of paradox, that this tower is in reality a Hindoo building, and not, as commonly supposed, a Muhammadan one. Never was paradox supported upon more frail, I might say absurd, foundations. They are these: 1st, that there is only one Mīnār, whereas there ought to have been two—had the unfinished one been intended as the second, it would not have been, as it really is, larger than the first; 2nd, that other

Mīnārs seen in the present day either do not slope inward from the base up at all, or do not slope so much as this. I tried to trace the origin of this paradox, and I think I found it in a silly old 'munshī' (clerk) in the service of the Emperor. He told me that he believed it was built by a former Hindoo prince for his daughter, who wished to worship the rising sun, and view the waters of the Jumna from the top of it every morning.873

There is no other Hindoo building like, or of the same kind as this;874 the ribbons or belts of passages from the Korān are all in relief; and had they not been originally inserted as they are, the whole surface of the building must have been cut down to throw them out in bold relief. The slope is the peculiar characteristic of all the architecture of the Pathāns, by whom the church to which this tower belongs was built.875 Nearly all the arches of the church are still standing in a more or less perfect state, and all correspond in design, proportion, and execution to the tower. The ruins of the old Hindoo temples about the place, and about every other place in India, are totally different in all three; here they are all exceedingly paltry and insignificant, compared with the church and its tower, and it is evident that it was the intention of the founder to make them appear so to future generations of the faithful, for he has taken care to make his own great work support rather than destroy them, that they might for ever tend to enhance its grandeur.876 It is sufficiently clear that the unfinished mīnār was commenced upon too large a scale, and with too small a diminution of the circumference from the base upwards. It is two-fifths larger than the finished tower in circumference, and much more perpendicular. Finding these errors when they had got some thirty feet from the foundation, the founder, Shams-ud-dīn (Īltutmish), began to work anew, and had he lived a little longer, there is no doubt that he would have raised the second tower in its proper place, upon the same scale as the one completed. His death was followed by several successive revolutions; five sovereigns succeeded each other on the throne of Delhi in ten years.877 As usual on such occasions, works of peace were suspended, and succeeding sovereigns sought renown in military enterprise rather than in building churches. This church was entire, with the exception of the second mīnār, when Tamerlane invaded India.878 He took back a model of it with him to Samarkand, together with all the masons he could find at Delhi, and is said to have built a church upon the same plan at that place, before he set out for the invasion of Syria.

The west face of the quadrangle, in which the tower stands, formed the church, which consisted of eleven large arched alcoves, the centre and largest of which contained the pulpit. In size and beauty they seem to have corresponded with the Mīnār, but they are now all in ruins.879 In the front of the centre of these alcoves stands the metal pillar of the old Hindoo sovereign of Delhi, Prithī Rāj, across whose temple all the great mosque, of which this tower forms a part, was thrown in triumph. The ruins of these temples he scattered all round the place, and consist of colonnades of stone pillars and pedestals, richly enough carved with human figures, in attitudes rudely and obscenely conceived. The small pillar is of bronze, or a metal which resembles bronze, and is softer than brass, and of the same form precisely as that of the stone pillar at Eran, on the Bīnā river in Mālwā, upon which stands the figure of Krishna, with the glory around his head.880

It is said that this metal pillar was put down through the earth, so as to rest upon the very head of the snake that supports the world; and that the sovereign who made it, and fixed it upon so firm a basis, was told by his spiritual advisers that his dynasty should last as long as the pillar remained where it was. Anxious to see that the pillar was really where the priests supposed it to be, that his posterity might be quite sure of their position, Prithī Rāj had it taken up, and he found the blood and some of the flesh of the snake's head adhering to the bottom. By this means the charm was broken, and the priests told him that he had destroyed all the hopes of his house by his want of faith in their assurances. I have never met a Hindoo that doubted either that the pillar was really upon this snake's head, or that the king lost his crown by his want of faith in the assurance of his priests. They all believe that the pillar is still stuck into the head of the great snake, and that no human efforts of the present day could remove it. On my way back to my tents, I asked the old Hindoo officer of my guard, who had gone with me to see the metal pillar, what he thought of the story of the pillar?

'What the people relate about the "kīlī" (pillar) having been stuck into the head of the snake that supports the world, sir, is nothing more than a simple historical fact known to everybody. Is it not so, my brothers?' turning to the Hindoo sipāhīs and followers around us, who all declared that no fact could ever be better established.

'When the Rājā,' continued the old soldier, 'had got the pillar fast into the head of the snake, he was told by his chief priest that his dynasty must now reign over Hindustan for ever. "But," said the Rājā, "as all seems to depend upon the pillar being on the head of the snake, we had better see that it is so with our own eyes." He ordered it to be taken up; the clergy tried to dissuade him, but all in vain. Up it was taken—the flesh and blood of the snake were found upon it—the pillar was replaced; but a voice was heard saying: "Thy want of faith hath destroyed thee—thy reign must soon end, and with it that of thy race."'

I asked the old soldier from whence the voice came.

He said this was a point that had not, he believed, been quite settled. Some thought it was from the serpent himself below the earth, others that it came from the high priest or some of his clergy. 'Wherever it came from,' said the old man, 'there is no doubt that God decreed the Rājā's fall for his want of faith; and fall he did soon after.' All our followers concurred in this opinion, and the old man seemed quite delighted to think that he had had an opportunity of delivering his sentiments upon so great a question before so respectable an audience.

The Emperor Shams-ud-dīn Īltutmish is said to have designed this great Muhammadan church at the suggestion of Khwāja Kutb-ud-dīn, a Muhammadan saint from Ūsh in Persia, who was his religious guide and apostle, and died some sixteen years before him.881 His tomb is among the ruins of this old city. Pilgrims visit it from all parts of India, and go away persuaded that they shall have all they have asked, provided they have given or promised liberally in a pure spirit of faith in his influence with the Deity. The tomb of the saint is covered with gold brocade, and protected by an awning—those of the Emperors around it he naked and exposed. Emperors and princes lie all around him; and their tombs are entirely disregarded by the hundreds that daily prostrate themselves before his, and have been doing so for the last six hundred years.882 Among the rest I saw here the tomb of Mu'azzam, alias Bahādur Shāh, the son and successor of Aurangzēb, and that of the blind old Emperor Shāh Alam, from whom the Honourable Company got their Dīwanī grant.883 The grass grows upon the slab that covers the remains of Mu'azzam, the most learned, most pious, and most amiable, l believe, of the crowned descendants of the great Akbar. These kings and princes all try to get a place as near as they can to the remains of such old saints, believing that the ground is more holy than any other, and that they may give them a lift on the day of resurrection. The heir apparent to the throne of Delhi visited the tomb the same day that I did. He was between sixty and seventy years of age.884

I asked some of the attendants of the tomb, on my way back, what he had come to pray for; and was told that no one knew, but every one supposed it was for the death of the Emperor, his father, who was only fifteen years older, and was busily engaged in promoting an intrigue at the instigation of one of his wives, to oust him, and get one of her sons, Mirza Salīm, acknowledged as his successor by the British Government. It was the Hindoo festival of the Basant,885 and all the avenues to the tomb of this old saint were crowded when I visited it. Why the Muhammadans crowded to the tomb on a Hindoo holiday I could not ascertain.

The Emperor Īltutmish, who died A.D. 1235, is buried close behind one end of the arched alcove, in a beautiful tomb without its cupola. He built the tomb himself, and left orders that there should be no 'parda' (screen) between him and heaven; and no dome was thrown over the building in consequence. Other great men have done the same, and their tombs look as if their domes had fallen in; they think the way should be left clear for a start on the day of resurrection.886 The church is stated to have been added to it by the Emperor Balban, and the Mīnār finished.887 About the end of the seventeenth century, it was so shaken by an earthquake that the two upper stories fell down. Our Government, when the country came into our possession, undertook to repair these two stories, and entrusted the work to Captain Smith, who built up one of stone, and the other of wood, and completed the repairs in three years. The one was struck by lightning eight or nine years after, and came down. If it was anything like the one that is left, the lightning did well to remove it.888

About five years ago, while the Emperor was on a visit to the tomb of Kutb-ud-dīn, a madman got into his private apartments. The servants were ordered to turn him out. On passing the Mīnār he ran in, ascended to the top, stood a few minutes on the verge, laughing at those who were running after him, and made a spring that enabled him to reach the bottom, without touching the sides. An eye-witness told me that he kept his erect position till about half-way down, when he turned over, and continued to turn till he got to the bottom, when his fall made a report like a gun. He was of course dashed to pieces. About five months ago another fell over by accident, and was dashed to pieces against the sides. A new road has been here cut through the tomb of the Emperor Alā- ud-dīn, who murdered his father-in-law-the first Muhammadan conqueror of Southern India, and his remains have been scattered to the winds.889