‘Every place is a Palimpsest’: A Critical Reading of Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel

Place and history have an entwining relation spread over a particular time and space. History finds its expression in place and later gives meanings to it. Place is the site for making a history or creating a history in which it plays an equally important role of a partner with the event, for instance if we recall some conjunctures in History – the battle of Panipat, the Buxar or Plassey battle, the Spanish era, the Greek culture, the English formalities or the Indian Independence movement. They all revive memories of events associated with places. In short, place is of great importance in understanding history and history finds itself in its most creative form in the refuge of place. It holds almost every kind of history, some recognized and some lost, but it always provides a gateway to investigate the past.

The article investigates the fact as to how the sedimentation of history takes place with an active engagement of time. The novelist hints at the society of Delhi, for that matter of any city or place, is never static and hence constantly evolving. Change is inevitable. It is something which is natural and in continuum. In Heideggerian terminology, time should be grasped in and of as the unity of the three dimensions of future, past and present. In Delhi: A Novel, the novelist’s mere intention is not to reconstruct the past of Delhi, rather he goes a step further by throwing light on the higher reality – the cycle of phenomenon of birth-growth-decay – that governs the lives of City and Man. He presents the making of Delhi with its history imbedded in it. Delhi acts as a palimpsest or rather a kind of parchment on which successive generations have written and rewritten the process of history-- a kind of parchment where successive invaders have inscribed and re-inscribed their activities. In a similar fashion V.S. Naipaul in his The Middle Passage (1962) talks about the conflict of the colonizers and the colonized to show how the colonial history is embedded in place. Singh’s narrative is a narrative that brings this issue to the forefront. Perhaps the most important text that discusses the notion of the palimpest could be Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay (1987) which thoroughly examines at length how empty space turned into place, continued to re-write the history of that place. “This was not a place which was ‘simply there’ but a place which is in a continual process of being re-written” (392). An important aspect of palimpsest is that the process of re-writing is embedded in the place, “[t]he concept of place as a palimpsest written and overwritten by successive (historical) inscriptions is one way of circumventing history as the ‘scientific narrative’ of events” (356).

Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel (1990) is, primarily, a story of Delhi from medieval to present times, by showing how through the ages it has been exploited, built, destroyed and rebuilt to reach its present state which is brought before us through the narrator’s and Bhagmati’s conversation. Their uninhibited sexual encounters also help bring the geography and culture of the place alive. Here Bhagmati and Delhi have been projected in a parallel way and as V. A. Shahane rightly sums up Singh’s art of fiction: “The essence of Khushwant Singh’s art of fiction is his innate capacity to capture reality in all its magnificence and horror” (354).  Singh’s rendering of the political history of Delhi and of the counterpart Bhagmati beautifully juxtaposes the theme of the novel.

In his foreword to the paperback edition of the novel Delhi, Singh writes: “All I wanted to do was to tell my readers what I learnt about the city… my only aim was to get them to know Delhi and love it as much as I do” . Singh quotes Mirza Ghalib’s couplet at the outset of the novel exquisitely, setting the tone of the novel where Delhi is a place that conceives multiple identities: “I asked my Soul: What is Delhi? / She replied: The world is the body and Delhi its life” (foreword). The novel centralizes on the aspect of invasion by different rulers and their roles in Delhi. In a way, Delhi is depicted like a feminine body which was attacked by the invaders to plunder and destroy rather than to develop it. The opening line of the novel endorses this very idea when the narrator observes, “I return to Delhi as I return to my mistress Bhagmati. Delhi and Bhagmati have a lot of commonality. It is only to their lovers among whom I count myself, that they reveal their true selves” (1).

Singh with his unique style unravels the story of the rulers that have made up the story of Delhi. He sheds all his inhibitions while talking about the reality of the city, which has witnessed myriad shades of life, ranging from the fall and rise of emperors to the assassination of Indira Gandhi to 1984 Sikh riots. In this connection, Rajendra Prasad observes how he captures “the innate feelings and the essential strengths and weakness of the rulers who have molded the destiny of India and of Delhi” (170). The city has witnessed every historical moment, from being the capital of the Raj in the early 20th century to being a platform that welcomed hundreds of thousands of refugees at Partition in 1947, to the authoritarian times of the Emergency in the 1970s, to the post-liberalization transformation of many shades, many faces. William Dalrymple in his Prologue to City of Djinns (1994), a travelogue and historical account on Indian capital Delhi, writes about Delhi saying that “... it had been burned by invaders time and time again, millennium after millennium, still the city was rebuilt; each time it rose like a phoenix from the fire” (9). Such invasions took away the purity of Delhi and destroyed the innocent appearance of the city. It has lost its virginity at their hands. It moves from an anodyne nature to detrimental condition. Shifting of power in the capital with the change of monarchs is not something new, rather it is an age-old practice.  Delhi, having been destroyed, dismantled and robbed off her possessions by various invaders, is being equated with Bhagmati who has witnessed the same fate: “…long been misused by rough people they have learnt to conceal their seductive charms under a mask of repulsive ugliness” (Singh, ,1).

The core of the narrative is Bhagmati surrounding whom each episode is presented in every alternating chapter. Perhaps it may be a trick on the part of the author to lighten the thematic seriousness of the narrative by creating funny situations involving Bhagmati, the hermaphrodite. Singh in opening part of the novel says that to a stranger the place is full of noisy bazaars, mean-looking hovels, few tumble-down forts, dead river, full of narrow and winding lanes, raw sewage, spitting phlegm and bloody betel-juice, people urinating and defecating anywhere. Like Delhi, Bhagmati appears to be full of negative images as unattractive to those who do not know her. “She is dark and has pock-marks on her face. She is short and squat; her teeth are uneven and yellowed as a result of chewing tobacco and smoking beedis. Her clothes are loud, her voice louder; her speech bawdy and her manners worse” (1). But to know the reality one has “to cultivate a sense of belonging to Delhi and an attachment to someone like Bhagmati” (1). He acknowledges both Delhi and Bhagmati based on the sense of commonality, “As I have said before I had two passions in my life: my city Delhi and Bhagmati. They have two things in common: they are lots of fun. And they are sterile” (30). Bhagmati’s body is invaded by different customers. In a way, Singh refers to the motif that both are capable of capturing people, yet can maintain their original being - undefiled. Like Delhi, Bhagmati has the privilege to serve many foreign clients. Delhi has not been ruled by any one ruler, it has been snatched and has exchanged hands

Though the narrative might appear to be a linear one it is not so.Bhagmati, ‘the hijda’/a eunuch is an interesting character whose persona has been meticulously developed by Singh to seek the attention of the larger audience for exhibiting some kind of sterility and hollowness pervading in the higher strata of the society. The story revolves around her. Bhagmati has been the epitome of barrenness as the hijda is incapable of producing any offspring. The place itself becomes fruitless like Bhagmati because of the destruction and rebuilding of it by foreign invaders over centuries. A similar statement is made by Ahmed Ali in the title page of the novel,Twilight in Delhi (1940) wherein he quotes Bahadur Shah Zafar’s verse, the last Mughal emperor to unravel the past and the present of the beautiful city.

Delhi was once a paradise,
Such peace had abided here;
But they have ravished its name and pride,
Remain now only ruins and care. (5)

Ahmed Ali then goes on to connect the Emperor’ to the present day’s sorry status of the city:

 

And, as if to echo the poet king’s thoughts, a silence and apathy of death descended upon the city, and dust began to blow in its streets, and ruin came upon its culture and its purity. Until the last century it had held its head high and tried to preserve its chastity and form. (5)

Ali uses powerful images to draw the picture of Delhi which happens to be a gloomy one. Then he goes on to unravel the loss of age-old grandeur, bemoans the past culture and ideology of the city.

Khushwant Singh tries his best to maintain the persona of a detached observer while unknotting the story of Delhi and its people. This position of the narrator is possible because he calls himself an agnostic. In an interview with Atma Ram, Singh claims, “Being an agnostic without any prejudices, I may have become the loudest voice against religious fundamentalism and stupid beliefs in miracles, astrology, and that of hocus-focus” (2). But now the scenario has completely changed. People who were rulers now they are under the force of colonial rules. Consciously or unconsciously we are still being ruled by them. It is the city which suffers the trauma of Independence and Partition. This is not the true essence of the city that we see today; rather what we see is the “bloody layer of the last century” (Malvika11).“Delhi by whatever name it is known – Lal Kot, Mehrauli, Shahr-i-Nau or Tughlakabad – has always been the seat of the emperors of Hindustan” (85). Indeed, it has been an abode and a heavenly seat for several foreign rulers. Delhi as a novel offers a commentary on the historical events of more than six centuries, though the narrator begins with the present.

The novel depicts the socio-political conditions and occurrences of the past and present times, and also delineates the cultural as well as the political turmoil of Delhi Sultanate in Delhi mainly due to accession of various foreign and internal invaders. Fred Lukermann proposes a number of characteristics of a place and, among them the one, which seems to sum up the tone of this particular textis: “Places are emerging and becoming; with historical and cultural change new elements are added and old elements disappear. Thus, places have a distinct historical component” (qtd. in Relph 3).Mughals treated Delhi sympathetically by building her monuments, gardens and sky piercing minarets; the pre-Mughal Muslim invaders just behaved like looters and thieves. They treated her only as a keep, and a prostitute, taking all her pleasures disfiguring her without any cordial humane relationship. Thus, Delhi in Singh’s hands acquires a metaphor of a woman superimposed by the figure of Bhagmati. Delhi was brave but also enchanting – a veiled maiden hiding all her wealth and beauty, making looters go wild. But her glittering charm brought the evil eye of the long series of invaders, vandalising her very being.

Delhi has lost its grandeur at the hand of time, but it was not to be destroyed. It has risen again from its ashes like the phoenix bird. The city stands tall to the test of time even after so much of political upheaval and has been at the centre of attraction to all the foreign invaders. Thenovel is not a lament over the vanished empires rather it is celebration of the unique power of different cultures and civilizations. Though sometimes the narrator wished to escape Delhi, “I am beginning to tire to Bhagmati as I am of Delhi” (315) but the cast spell by Delhi is not easy to escape. There is a saying “once a Dilliwala always a Dilliwala ... “I no longer want to buy myself an air ticket to get abroad to get away from Bhagmati and Delhi. I told you – once you are in their clutches there is no escape” (315). The description of Delhi by Nadir Shah fetches the characteristics of Dehliwala in much eloquent words, “We had heard that the people of Delhi loved their city as bees love flowers. But we could not believe that the child of a courtesan would prefer to live in a Delhi brothel rather than our palace in Iran!” (180).

Travelling through time, space and history to discover the city, the narrator meets myriads of people-poet, princess, saints and sultans, temptresses and traitors, emperors and others who have made this city a mystique. The story of Delhi, from Sultanate days to the 1984 anti-Sikh riots has been told from the viewpoints of the important characters involved. The narrative touches quite an emotional chord as one almost feels the live presence of the revered Nizamuddin Auliya, understand the bigotry of Aurangzeb, feel the helplessness of Meer Taqi Meer, know the determination of Jaita Rangretta and Lakhi Rai to save the honor of their Guru, learn the honesty of Ram Rakha and the fate of Bahadur Shah, the last Mughal Emperor, who have been in most of the places described in books but never saw them with such a historical perspective. 

Reading Singh’s novel as a palimpsest highlights the sedimentation of human history embedded in the place, the layers of past knowledge, experience and memory that constitute our human sense of place which are underpinned by reference to real events, revealing a hidden history and inner tensions which, in turn, reveal the city and its landscape through the stylistic use of metaphoric and artistic imagery within the palimpsest of memory. Thus, places have a distinct characteristic of being a palimpsest. 

Works Cited:

Ali, Ahmed. Twilight in Delhi. New Delhi: Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd, 2007. Print.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Dalrymple, William. City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi. New Delhi: Penguin, 1993. Print.

Relph, Ewdard. Place and Placelessnes. London: Pion Limited, 1976. Print.

Singh, Khushwant. Delhi: A Novel. New Delhi: Penguin, 1990. Print.

----------------------- The Company of Women. New Delhi: Viking, 1999. Print.

Singh, Malvika. Perpetual City: A Short Biography of Delhi. New Delhi: Aleph, 2013.Print.

Shahane, V.A. “Khushwant Singh: An Artist in Realism.” Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English. Ed. M.K. Naik. Madras: Macmillan, 1972. Print.