Medieval Delhi under siege... again.

Delhi is not now and never was Constantinople. No cyclopean walls looked with contempt upon all invaders. The city has usually relied on the death-bearing mountain chains hundreds of miles to the north and west for protection. After one makes it through one of the convenient passes, however, the Indo Gangetic Plain is open for pillaging. Unfortunately for 6000-plus years of Indian farmers, marauding Greeks, Huns, Turks, Mongols, Afghans, Persians, and others seemed to have figured this out more quickly than they did. Modern Delhi stands on the ruins of at least eight previous “Delhis,” sacked one and all by people riding faster horses. These Delhis didn’t go quietly either. For instance, Timur’s (aka Tamerlane) 1398 sack of the city was so inhumanly brutal that the notoriously vicious warlord basically said “Not it,” raising his hand to his forehead and disavowing all responsibility for what his soldiers had done to the city and its inhabitants. But, every cloud as they say, and as a result of all this destruction, we now have quite a rich vein of ruins and artifacts at which to marvel and, with luck, reconstruct some history.

Unfortunately Timur sacked-Delhi, now known as Firoz Shah Kotla and pictured at the top of the entry, and thousands of other historical sites across India now face a second and final death at the merciless and eternal hands of time, apathy, vandalism, theft, erosion, plate tectonics, and other nefarious agents. Combating the decay would be difficult enough if it was India’s only problem which, you already know or could guess, it is not. Aside from a whole host of phantom (read: military) issues at which the Indian government happily throws crores (a crore is ten million) of Rupees (R. 42=$1), most Indians remain abysmally impoverished. So, we see a country with endangered historical treasures and endangered human lives and not enough Rupees to go around. What to do, what to do. I do not pretend to have an answer, but I will explore a few aspects of this dilemma and encourage everyone to think about it, because the problem is not going away on its own and creative solutions are very much in demand.

I start with the more pressing issue. Most Indians live in a state of absurd poverty. This is made all the more absurd by the extreme wealth of a very few families such as the Tata’s of steel fame (This is in no way an attack on the very generous Tata family who has funded 1/7 of Mr. Szykowny’s research – Ed.). Everyday on my way to the archives, at each red-light, children as young as 6 or 7 wind their way through many lanes of traffic to do back-flips and show off their double-jointedness hoping that drivers will throw them a rupee or two. Last weekend I walked through an underpass on the North side and found, literally, hundreds of homeless men trying to get some sleep on bare concrete surrounded by piles of garbage. Some were naked, many had wounds that could be measured in feet and appeared to festering. Even on “the mall,” that monumental avenue leading up to the government buildings, there are scattered tent villages. Imagine, for a moment, walking out of the Smithsonian and bumping into someone’s hovel.

One knows a country is in trouble when the military is seen as a good career opportunity. I’m not going to bother wasting my time or anyone else’s finding economic statistics. All I’m saying is in “the world’s largest democracy” (ß Man, does hearing that get old fast, kind of like that scene in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” where the guy drinks from the false grail, word.), most people cannot read. This marks quite a departure from somewhere like China where, say what you will, but the literacy rate is well over 80%. Many millions of Indians are malnourished etc. etc. IT has fuelled a middle-class surge, but so much of what is said about India in the U.S. right now is media hype. Congress reps may complain about all the jobs “stolen” by call centers in India, but those jobs barely scratch the surface here. I don’t think Delhi has many, if any, of them. Despite that development, the major cleavage visible to my untrained eye is still servant-served. Although most people here are not servants in a technical sense, one soon learns to tell who has the money and calls the shots and who falls in line. Most people do seem to fit in one category or the other, the great majority in the latter. In Delhi at least, it’s not nearly as much a caste thing as a modern bourgeois-proletariat distinction.

So, that’s the poverty end in short, but what about the critical situation facing India’s material past? The myriad climates found in India all seem to maltreat documents, but buildings, stone relief, sculptures, cave paintings, pottery, have worn well all things considered. I would argue that India has more ruins and artifacts than any other nation-state, which makes sense considering its size and the early onset of agriculture (sometime around 7000 BC). Even if one disputes this statement, then India at least has the most sites of which we are aware thanks to the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Established by the British in 1871, it emerged from the earlier Asiatic Society of Bengal whose history extends to its founding in 1784 by William Jones who discovered the Indo-European language family (that guy was no joke, before him, no one realized that Indo-Iranian languages had the same parent tongue as European ones). Back to the issue, so archaeological exploration began in India a full 84 years before Heinrich Schliemann discovered “Troy,” the accepted date for the birth of modern archaeology. 223 years of work has resulted in the ASI currently overseeing in excess of 3,000 sites. Think about that. That number is insane. Add millions of recovered artifacts held in India’s museums (2 million-plus in the National Museum alone) and thousands more in public and private collections overseas). Numbers, numbers, numbers. Qualitatively speaking, Harappan sites in the Northwest have the world’s oldest plumbing systems. Gandharan artifacts from the North attest the existence of an Indo-Greek hybrid civilization which produced perfectly proportioned images of Caucasian Buddhas. Thousand year-old erotic sculptures adorn the Khajuraho temple complex frozen in acts that would make Larry Flynt blush. I do not even need to mention the Taj Mahal, but I guess I just did anyway. Summary: this stuff is sick, sicker than Pol Pot.

Unfortunately for humanity, the Indian government takes almost as good care of its past as it does of its poor. I’ve read about the India-wide decay, but I can only speak about Delhi from experience: Two weekends ago I arrived at the Delhi Sultanate city of the Tughluqs at modern Delhi’s southern edge, aptly named, Tughluqabad. I was one of maybe four visitors at a site in various stages of uncover scattered over a basin of 5 or so km^2. Before I even set foot inside, there were a few issues. 1) The taxiwallahs looked confused when I told them where I wanted to go and it soon became apparent that nothing whatsoever had been done to make people aware of this ruin, one of Delhi’s finest. 2) The site originally spread over a far larger area but a four-lane road now bisects it, not to mention the damage caused by an adjacent Air Force facility. 3) Three men have been deputed to tend the entire area of Tughluqabad, two were hanging out smoking under a tree and slowly ambled into the ticket booth after it became clear that I was not in fact going away. 50 meters behind them another man tore my ticket. Inside… no one. Well, that’s not exactly true. There were some goats, donkeys, and chickens and their shepard-type minders.

Upon further inspection, there seemed to be a dozen or so men living in lean-to’s constructed in the medieval doorways. They all assured me they were night-watchmen and would give me a tour for twice the price of my ticket. I declined one, then another, then a third, but a fourth having seen all this still decided to try his luck. Heading for the uninhabited zone towards the center of the depression I passed by large, open pits containing what I believe were industrial solvents. I don’t know how or why, but I know what I saw, large pools of something approximating bleach. In addition to the remains of recent settlement, trash littered the area. The once thorough excavations had been resisted and, at last, turned back by the never-tiring flow of soil deposits. No one had cleared a weed since the early 1990’s if not earlier. Curious to take in the panorama, I scrambled up an eroding, earth-filled tower. Each direction I turned, towering smokestacks of progress rippled in the sickeningly misty haze of CO2. It was as though the relatively minor decay at Tughluqbad merely heralded the encroaching tentacles of industrial improvement. Ok, now I’ve moved on to issues extending well beyond the increasingly massive scope of this entry, but they all serve to hasten the destruction of the monuments. Fortunately, this site at least remained largely free of the graffiti tattooing some more central locations attract. I must cynically attribute this to the probable illiteracy of the poorer folks in the neighborhood.

I’m not going out of my way to paint a bleak picture, but if the glass on this one is even half full, that’s only due to the ingenuity of the engineers who designed these ramparts centuries ago. I still tremendously enjoyed making my way through Tughluqabad and it had certain rustic charms. Here’s something else, though, there were a scant two signs on the premises. One informed me this place was a national treasure (if one needs a sign to tell one this, the preservationists have some ‘splaining to do) and I was not to remove anything. The second told me that this was Tughluqabad, who built it and when. That was it. No map of the city. No helpful indicators of the functional importance of different areas. No mention of why this city had been constructed, why it had been abandoned. Wikipedia should never help one understand a place more than the place itself. The photo below with all the love-etchings is one of the better-run places here, the tomb of Humayun the second Mughal emperor. This was in his tomb chamber which was restored not five years ago. I saw no staff member looking in while there.

I could go on in this vein, but I’ll spare us both. If you told me things were like this because of all the new schools being built and job programs and low-income housing, I’d be disappointed, but I would understand completely. To prioritize old piles of stone over human lives would be despicable. Even if that were true, however, which it isn’t, many low-cost measures can be undertaken to stem the degrading tides.

So, no solutions here, as I promised, but a few humble suggestions perhaps, you know, just to get the ball rolling. Whenever faced with a national government’s spending dilemma, I have a solid cop-out answer. Quite simply, cut the military budget. It’s obscene what they spend to defend a border that never should have existed. Imagine if we spent billions of dollars annually fortifying the Mason-Dixon Line (I know, that doesn’t sound all bad to me either, but let’s focus). And, not to be a downer, but the space program? I know there’s no rule saying your people all have to be fed before you can start launching phalluses, Vishnu knows the U.S. has no such policy. Yet, when I see emaciated children winging through traffic, I can’t help thinking maybe India should save on rocket fuel. Nevertheless, the space budget here is negligible compared to the anti-Pakistan budget. Though I’m not talking about Pakistan here, rest assured, my criticism straddles the inane frontier.

Ok, so defense cut, not happening. Many too self-interested historians and antiquarianists would have you believe one rupee invested in preservation produces exponentially increasing revenue from tourism. They lie. That said, pick up the trash and pound in a couple helpful signs and Tughluqabad starts turning a modest profit by next week. Investing in one’s heritage definitely draws tourist cash, but people shouldn’t exaggerate that benefit.

Besides pimping one’s national heritage out for camera-happy Occidentals, I believe there are great educational benefits for one’s own countrypeople. The vast majority of people at these sites, at least in the summer, are Indian. Honestly, by a margin of 100:1. Children and adults alike are fascinated by places like the Red Fort, decrepit as it is. Imagine how much more popular it could be if one-third of the buildings were not closed off because they couldn’t be maintained at current funding levels. I don’t know how to quantify the public education benefits, and maybe those rupees would be better spent on teacher salaries, but maybe not, they aren’t going there anyway as I mentioned.

What prevents these subtle improvements and the hiring of a couple legit guards? Well, to get anything done here, one has to navigate an almost comic labyrinth of rigid, anachronistic bureaucracy (Britain’s real legacy, well, that and cricket). Unfortunately, the Minotaur of Industrial Capitalism waits to gore you at the exit should you find your way. The officials don’t care because that’s not their department and the rich don’t care because it doesn’t help the bottom line. Sure, every once in a while a would-be Bill Gates throws some money around, but it’s the same garbage as philanthropy in the U.S., if that. Given the length of this post, take the socialist talking points as read.

Where does this all leave us? We still don’t know how to preserve our heritage while helping our impoverished brethren. All we know is that the “wouldn’t it be nice” solutions of capitalists really giving back and the government giving up nucs aren’t going to happen. Something has absolutely got to be done about the poverty here. It’s stomach turning. That is for another set of entries though. I have some bullet points for fiscally manageable solutions to the preservation issue:

1) Bury what you cannot protect. It was safe underground for a long time and safe it will stay. The ASI will ensure we don’t forget where we put it. Some day, when the Indian resources catch up to the British spades, do it again, but properly.

2) Don’t privatize. It’s tempting when looking to turn a quick buck, but that concern must remain secondary to long-lasting public good. Letting entrepreneurs run the show will turn a learning experience into a circus. I’ll take the benign neglect of the Civil Service of India to Coca Cola presents the Taj Mahal any day.

3) Fork over some more money now to put people on the ground. This includes both Indian academics in need of jobs to direct restoration and on-site education as well as workers to keep things orderly and prevent people from carving up ancient walls. Labor is cheap here and adding a couple people to these sites would dramatically improve the situation. Barring that, at least check up on the attendants you already have to make sure they occasionally stir from their naps.

4) Get foreign help. Everybody is tetchy about asking the British to come back and save them from themselves, as they should be. That said, this current Hindu-nationalist led aversion to accepting the help of foreign scholars and institutions is out of hand. I had an archaeology professor who spent months at Vijayanagara in the south and wasn’t allowed to put a spade in the ground. The days when white people stole everything and shipped it to the British Museum are long gone. Honestly, a lot of historians and archaeologists just want to help and all the Indian government needs to do is let them dig and publish. Clearly, India should have the final say in such operations and nothing should be exported, but what is the harm in accepting some help?

I don’t know how to really address vandalism in my own culture, much less Indian cultures, but I do know the government has to lead by example. Some of you are probably tired of me identifying “the government” as some abstract, negligent boogie man, but I don’t know quite what else to say. That is who I ultimately hold responsible and the incomprehensibility of the political system here ensures I don’t know at which branch to point the finger. Furthermore, government officials are the ones putting up signs about how you shouldn’t touch anything and chasing away foreign scholars. They have put themselves in charge, and now they shall reap the rewards of my tongue-lashing. To the extent any of India’s monuments enjoy protection right now, I credit it to the government’s failure to build roads to them.

Ok, next entry sooner. Fewer words, more pictures per word.

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