We are always curious to know what others think about us! About 118 years before President Obama came calling to Delhi, compatriot Mark Twain had observed: “So far as I am concerned India is the only foreign land I ever daydream about or deeply long to see again.” Fifty years later John Wohlfarth, after serving in India, recorded in his diary: “The world needs India intact! Tear down Roman ruins if you will, level Cyclopean walls, build bridges with stones of gothic abbeys and feudal fortresses but lay no hand on the glory and grandeur of India.” Both US visitors were among those who looked at the country without prejudice, unlike the British. Twain was fascinated by the monuments of Delhi and Wohlfarth too while sitting under the Qutub Minar, wandering in the Purana Quila and the Red Fort or while viewing the sublime beauty of the Taj Mahal. These impressions are among many recorded by Pran Nevile during research in the US Library of Congress which gave birth to the treatise, “India Through American Eyes” (Primus Books).
In 1833, while Akbar Shah-II was on the throne, American ice was introduced into the Mughal empire. It replaced mountain ice brought from the Himalayas since the time of Akbar the Great in bullock carts and stored in wells to last through the summer. In Shah Jahan’s reign there were ice-fields near Turkman Gate where ice made in winter was stored for use when the weather turned beastly hot. The credit for bringing the first ice-ships to Calcutta, Bombay and Madras goes to Frederick Tudor, who as a result became a very rich man and the ice-fields of Turkman Gate slowly disappeared.
There is a fascinating account of Elehu Yale (after whom Yale University is named) who as Governor of Madras received a female Mughal emissary (from Delhi) reported to be of “majestic form and the magnificence of whose pearls and diamonds were beyond description”. There was also a report about a nawab’s wife, published in 1743 (Mohammed Shah’s reign), whose “glittering costume, elaborate sophisticated make-up and exotic jewellery, which adorned her from head to toe”, was enchanting. The refreshments served on “gold plates, with guests being entertained to 60 dishes” were among the amazing accounts of Mughal hospitality.
Bayard Taylor, who came in 1853 (four years before the First War of Independence) as correspondent of New York Tribune, was fascinated by a ride in a palanquin. After going about in it in the Capital, he took a horse-drawn Dak buggy and travelled from Delhi to Meerut, Agra, Mussoorie, Kanpur, Lucknow, Allahabad, Benaras and Calcutta. About the Taj, he observed: “Did you ever build a castle in the air? Here is one brought down to earth… when seen from a distance, so like a fabric of mist and sunbeams.” In 1871, the Rev William Butler said “that a flute played gently in the vaults below where the remains of the Emperor and his consort repose, produces a sound, which is perhaps the finest to be heard as it were from heaven and breathed by angels”.
Gertrude Emerson, who visited Delhi, Agra and Lahore in 1923, says, “Here were lavishly scattered the great red sandstone forts and gates of Akbar, the marble palaces and pearl mosques of Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb and the magnificent tombs they constructed”. She goes on to say: “I sat alone for a long time once at the top of one of the four minarets surrounding the Taj Mahal. It was a night of a full November moon, and silver mists clung to the Jumna, flowing silently past the great marble platform from which the Taj rises with ineffable grace. I had had my first view of this far-famed ‘Crown of Palaces’ from the Jasmine Tower at Agra Fort, whence Shah Jahan, an old man and a prisoner, fallen upon evil days, must often have looked out mournfully at the beautiful mausoleum he had erected many years before, in honour of Mumtaz Mahal, his queen… Suddenly in the moonlight it was like the breast of a lovely woman.” According to Percy Brown, it was the magic of Indo-Persian architecture blended by rulers originally from beyond the Oxus.
As for dance and music, Lily Strickland Anderson, a prolific composer of music, writer and painter, was captivated by the performance of two nautch girls invited from Delhi to perform at a Raja’s party in Bombay. They were obviously from Chawri Bazar and akin to midsummer night fairies. Some other Americans were struck by the soulful singing in the fields and village streets “and the many sorts of (rural) work done to the lilt of a song”. All in all, an amazing saga of a medieval and emerging modern scene. Such was the milieu that produced Esther Sherman (Ragini Devi), her daughter, Indrani Rehman and granddaughter Sukanya.
