Days 16-20

Day 16: Monday, July 15
Free morning and a low-key afternoon of temple visiting in Delhi. First stop was the Birla Mandir, a Hindu temple built by the wealthy Birla family (a Bombay mercantile firm whose interests today include construction materials and telecommunications). It was opened in 1938 by none other than Gandhi and today is a clean and peaceful place with high ceilings and an appealing cast of glass-encased gods to whom quiet families somberly distribute flowers and sweetmeats. It's certainly one of the most visually pleasing temples I saw. From the street it looks like this:

Then a short hop around the corner to a Sikh temple, the Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, sort of a more compact and rugged version of the Golden Temple at Amritsar, with a cleansing pool, golden inner sanctum, and Sikhs distributing buttery clumps of sweet, nutty dough to everyone exiting the temple. It looked like this:

Days 17-18: Tuesday, July 16 and Wednesday, July 17
Class on Tuesday, devoted to the medieval Delhi sultanate, about whom I remember little except that they didn't adopt the most sustainable building practices, insofar as they kept abandoning cities and building new ones for themselves anytime a new dynasty came along. On Wednesday morning we visited one such city, or rather the ruins of one, at Tughluqabad, built by a king named Tughluq in the 1320s. It was inhabited for all of four years before being abandoned, probably for want of a good water supply, and today its crumbling walls spread loftily over a surprising amount of prime south Delhi real estate. We were virtually the only visitors there, so we had our own security detail of bored guards who protected us from monkeys and children by chasing them off with giant sticks. The ruins looked like this:

We were far from the only visitors at our next stop, the Qutb Minar complex, another sultanate city built in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Qutb Minar itself is a massive sandstone-and-marble minaret, the tallest in India (I suppose this is a mark of some distinction, since all the literature mentions it, but ask me to name the tallest minaret of any other country and I'm afraid I won't be able to answer you), and it's suitably impressive - unusually textured for a minaret, it looks like it would make a pleasing "qutb-qutb-qutb" sound if you were to lay it on its side and roll it across the floor. It looks like this:

The rest of the complex is arguably even more interesting, since you can get really close to the ruins and investigate the weird, chunky asymmetry of a place that was built largely of bits and pieces of older buildings, mostly Hindu temples (although our guide here, an historian from Delhi University, was careful to point out that this kind of spoliation was not a uniquely Muslim practice - Hindus stole pieces of each other's temples all the time). The mosque is particularly fun in this respect: on its walls and columns one can easily spot defaced Hindu idols, and there's no effort at all to maintain stylistic consistency, so the place looks a little like it was built of ill-matched Lego sets. To wit:

Days 19-20: Thursday, July 18 and Friday, July 19
Free morning on Thursday (so back to the archives) and then class in the afternoon, where we met Ebba, one of the world's leading authorities on Mughal architecture, and the Taj Mahal in particular. Nice PowerPoint presentation showing the evolution of the Mughals' distinctive syncretic style, made all the better by Ebba's personal presence, which combines erudition, humility, and a sort of aristocratic languor - she reminded me of a Habsburg countess in a Marx Brothers movie, which I mean as a (very high) compliment.

So lecture on Thursday and then a visit to Humayun's Tomb on Friday morning. Humayun was one of the more hapless Mughal rulers: chased out of Delhi a few years into his reign, he had barely begun to enjoy his recapturing of the city when he tripped down the steps of his library (allegedly as he fell to his knees to answer the call to prayer) and died. He is decidedly more glorious in death than he ever was in life: his tomb, built by his son Akbar, is a sublime place of peace and symmetry, well preserved and tastefully restored. It looks like this:

Thanks to our friends in (ahem) high places, we were granted special permission to visit the roof of the tomb, where later Mughal rulers presumably had concerts and cookouts. This was very exciting, so I took a few pictures. Here's one of them:

After morning at the tomb the afternoon was free, so Steven and I decided to visit the Nicholson Cemetery, a Christian graveyard established during the British period and named after a psychopathic army officer who died during the 1857 revolt. It's a forbidding, overgrown place with cruel looking monkeys and silent people crouching in the grass slowly clipping the undergrowth. The tombstones are cracked and lopsided, and, were it not for a handful of shiny newish graves in one corner of the grounds, it would be a perfect metaphor for the fading of Britain's imperial grandeur. As it is, it is merely an imperfect metaphor of same. Here's what it looks like:

After ghosting around there for a while we decided to try walking the two-three kilometers to the 1857 Mutiny Memorial, but the neighborhood was fetid and homicidey, and we didn't quite make it. Instead (as some subsequent Googling would reveal) we made it to within a stone's throw of the monument before deciding that if we ever wanted to see our families again we should turn tail and retreat to the nearest Metro station. Buying our tokens and ascending the escalator to the clean, breezy platform was like entering another world: the 10 rupee charge was just enough to ensure that our only companions in the station were the crisp and airconditioned middle classes. We were protected from the mean streets of Delhi by a barrier precisely 16 cents high.