Old Delhi to New: A Murderous History of India’s Capital City

Go to Delhi these days and you’ll be hit by a slew of jokes about the city’s choking smog. Gallows humour, perhaps, but you can sense a certain grim determination by Delhiites to persevere in the face of extreme provocation. At times, the air in India’s capital is so thick and sulphurous, it might be spooned into boxes and marketed as coal tar soap.

But Delhi is more than its smog.

He who holds the key to Delhi, holds India.

So goes the old legend.

My love affair with Delhi goes back twenty years. Back in the Noughties, I briefly lived in India’s capital, at a time when the country was thundering along the tracks to modernity, powered by the twin engines of globalisation and hyper-consumerism. (I remember an afternoon spent at a Rolls Royce showroom, testing out cars so expensive they would have made the average maharajah call for a brandy and a heart specialist. Needless to say, I left with my bank balance undisturbed.)

Many years later, having returned to the UK, I have chosen to revisit Delhi – albeit an older version – by way of my latest novel, City of Destruction, the fifth in my Malabar House historical crime series. The books are set in 1950s India, just a few years after Indian Independence, the horrors of Partition, and Gandhi’s assassination. The first in the series, Midnight at Malabar House, won the Crime Writers’ Association Historical Dagger, the world’s premier award for historical mystery fiction, and introduced Persis Wadia, India’s first female police inspector, paired with Archie Blackfinch, an English forensic scientist, both at large in India’s city of dreams: Bombay. Persis qualifies and is relegated to the city’s smallest police station, populated by the force’s rejects and misfits – inviting a generous comparison by The Sunday Times to Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels.

In City of Destruction, Persis is on the trail of a dead political assassin, a young man she herself has terminated. Harried along by his dying words, and her own guilt, she finds herself in India’s ancient capital, Delhi.

Which brings us neatly back to India’s premier metropolis.

Here is a city that has been around for well over a thousand years, its fabled beginnings in the mythic city of Indraprastha, the city of the Pandavas from the Hindu epic, Mahabharata. Having jumped from site to site – no fewer than seven times, according to some archaeologists – no one location can call itself the Delhi. Chewing up and spitting out dynasties in the way the city’s denizens chew (and expectorate) betel nut wraps, Delhi has lured many a conqueror on to the shoals of his own reckless ambition. The Mauryans, the Guptas, the Tomara Rajputs: all have come, conquered, and then vanished back into oblivion.

In the thirteenth century, the Mamluk Turks established the Delhi Sultanate. These bloodthirsty former slave-soldiers embraced Islam and transformed themselves – through the simple expedient of wholesale slaughter – into emirs, beys, and sultans.

In the 1500s, the Mughals employed gunpowder and field artillery to supplant the Turks. Led by Babur, descendant of Mongol warlords Genghis Khan and Timur – a.k.a. Tamerlane – the newcomers made short work of conquest. Babur’s victory at Panipat has gone down in myth: it was said that his ranked cannon terrified the Turkish elephant cavalry to such an extent that the beasts turned tail and trampled their own troops into the battlefield.

The Mughals ruled Delhi for three centuries, with only short lapses in control over the city, namely, invasions by the Marathas, the Sikhs, and the Iranians, the latter led by Nadir Shah, an incursion that surrendered the fabled Peacock Throne. (The visionary behind the Taj Mahal, Emperor Shah Jahan, commissioned the Peacock Throne as a literal seat for the Mughal emperors. The throne took seven years to complete, at an eye-watering cost. Among the hundreds of jewels embedded in the throne was the famed Koh-i-Noor diamond, later brought to England and now resident in the Tower of London as part of the Crown Jewels.)

Last, but never least, came the British.

Driving around Connaught Place, New Delhi’s business district, a cab driver told me that the place had once been a forested wilderness populated by wild pigs and jackals drily adding that not much had changed. The only difference was that now the jackals wore tailored suits.

Connaught Place was designed with the well-heeled in mind, and not just the subcontinent’s British overseers. Many of India’s princes – the former rulers of her princely states – maintained homes here. Entire industries flourished locally thanks to the princes’ penchant for lavishing fortunes on both their own gratification and the gratification of their legions of wives, foreign mistresses, and pets.

Nudge the cab a little further and you will find Birla House (now Gandhi Smriti), the place where Gandhi not only spent the final months of his life, but where he was shot dead by a gunman on 30 January 1948. Martyr’s Column marks the exact spot where India’s great statesman was felled. The shadow of his passing, and its impact on the India that was established after his death, continues to hang over the subcontinent today.

My Malabar House novels explore the history that I wish we had been taught in school, a balanced account of the British time in India, the human stories – British and Indian – that illuminated the period, and the India that emerged in the aftermath of the Raj. That I choose to weave this history into murder mysteries merely reflects my belief that learning is sometimes best appreciated when dressed up in the finery of entertainment.

After all, revisiting the three-hundred-year-relationship between Britain and India cannot be done without a little pomp and ceremony.

Vaseem Khan is the award-winning author of City of Destruction, the latest in the Malabar House series.