Revision as of 13:56, 18 February 2014

Extracted from:

Delhi: Past And Present

By H. C. Fanshawe, C.S.I.

Bengal Civil Service, Retired;

Late Chief Secretary To The Punjab Government,

And Commissioner Of The Delhi Division

John Murray, London. I9o2.

NOTE: While reading please keep in mind that all articles in this series have been scanned from a book. Therefore, footnotes have got inserted into the main text of the article, interrupting the flow. Readers who spot these footnotes gone astray might like to shift them to the correct place.

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Delhi: Chandni 'Chauk' in 1902

Adjoining the mosque on the east is the Delhi Municipal Hospital, called after Lord Dufferin, by whom the foundation-stone was laid, one of the largest and best organised institutions in the Province. From this the Dariba leads to the Chandni Chauk, upon which it formerly opened through the Khuni Darwazah.

This gate was so-called from the special massacre which took place near it, under the orders of Nadir Shah, and it was through it— opened by the plucky daring of a chaprassi and four British soldiers— and down the Dariba that the 3rd assaulting Column advanced on 14th September 1857 up to the angle which then existed in the street near the Jama Masjid, but had ultimately to fall back.

The portion of the Chandni Chauk frotn the fort, as far as the Dariba, was originally called the Urdu, or military bazar. On the north side of it stands the fine building now occupied by the Delhi Bank, which was once the residence of the Begam Samru.1 It was on the roof of an outhouse of this building that the Manager of the Bank, Mr Beresford, desperately defended himself and his family on 11th May 1857, until overborne by numbers. West of the Dariba came the Phul-ki-Mandi, or Flower Market, up to the Kotwali, followed by the Jauhri, or Jewellers’ Bazar, and Chandni Chauk proper, the name of which was gradually extended to the whole street.

It was originally built with arcades of shops one storey high to the front, the warehouses and residences of the traders being behind these. Unhappily, this once famous eastern street has now hardly anything eastern in appearance about it. At the end of the last century houses had been built both across it and down the centre of it, but these were all removed after 1803.

Further west a fountain and the south-west gates of the Queen’s (Begam) Gardens are reached on the right hand, and the Kotwali, or Police Station, and the Golden Mosque of Roshan-ud-daulah (who was Bakhshi under the Emperor Muhammad Shah, and is remembered as a notorious and successful bribe-taker), on the left.

The front part of the Kotwali has always served the purposes of a police station, but the portion behind was once the residence of a well-known man, Maulana Fakhruddin. In the middle of the bazar in front of the Kotwali were erected gallows, on which many leading mutineers and encouragers of disloyalty and disturbance met their fate after September 1857, including Nawab Abdurrahman Khan of Jhajjar and Raja Nahar Singh of Ballabgarh, and on this spot were exposed the bodies of the three royal princes, one a son and one a grandson of the king, shot by Captain Hodson on 18th September.

The Golden Mosque has an earlier and darker memory, as the place where the Persian invader, Nadir Shah, sat during the massacre of the people of the city in March 1739. The incident is thus described by an historian of the time:— On the morning of the 11th, an order went forth from the Persian Emperor for the slaughter of the inhabitants.

The result may be imagined; one moment seemed to have sufficed for universal destruction. The Chandni Chauk, the fruit market, the Daribah Bazar, and the buildings around the Masjid-i-Jama were set fire to and reduced to ashes. The inhabitants, one and all, were slaughtered. Here and there some opposition was offered, but in most places people were butchered unresistingly. The Persians laid violent hands on everything and everybody; cloth, jewels, dishes of gold and silver, were acceptable spoil.

The author beheld these horrors from his mansion, situated in the Wakilpura Muhalla outside the city, resolved to fight to the last if necessary, and with the help of God to fall at least with honour. But, the Lord be praised, the work of destruction did not extend beyond the abovenamed parts of the capital. Since the days of Hazrat Sahib-Kiran Amir Timur, who captured Old Delhi and ordered the inhabitants to be massacred, up to the present time, A.H. 1151, a period of 348 years, the capital had been free from such visitations. The ruin in which its beautiful streets and buildings were now involved was such that the labour of years could alone restore the town to its former state of grandeur.

[1 Another house of the Began Samru, known as the Barud Khana, or Powder Magazine, is situated in the Churiwalan quarter. It was in this that a terrific explosion took place on the 7th August 1857, and killed a number of the enemy.]

But to return to the miserable inhabitants. The massacre lasted half the day, when the Persian Emperor ordered Haji Fulad Khan, the Kotwal, to proceed through the streets accompanied by a body of Persian Nasakchis, and proclaim an order for the soldiers to desist from carnage. By degrees the violence of the flames subsided, but the bloodshed, the devastation, and the ruin of families were irreparable. For a long time the streets remained strewn with corpses, as the walks of a garden with dead flowers and leaves.

The town was reduced to ashes, and had the appearance of a plain consumed with fire. All the regal jewels and property, and the contents of the treasury were seized by the Persian conqueror in the citadel. He thus became possessed of treasure to the amount of sixty lacs of rupees and several thousand ashrafis; plate of gold to the value of one kror of rupees, and the jewels, many of which were unrivalled in beauty by any in the world, were valued at about fifty krors.

The Peacock Throne alone, constructed at great pains in the reign of Shah Jahan, had cost one kror of rupees, Elephants, horses, and precious stuffs, whatever pleased the conqueror’s eye, more indeed than can be enumerated, became his spoil. In short, the accumulated wealth of 348 years changed masters in a moment.

Proceeding up the Chandni Chauk and passing many shops of the principal dealers in jewels, embroideries, and other products of Delhi handicrafts, the Northbrook Clock Tower and the principal entrance to the Queen’s Gardens are reached. The former is situated at the site of the Karavan Sarai of the Princess Jahanara Begam , known by the title of Shah Begam.

The Sarai, the square in front of which projected across the street, was considered by Bernier one of the finest buildings in Delhi, and was compared by him with the Palais Royal, because of its arcades below and rooms with a gallery in front above. Bernier was of opinion that the population of Delhi in 1665 was much the same as that of Paris, a striking instance of how population follows the court in the East. The gardens must at one time have been extremely beautiful specimens of eastern pleasure retreats, and even now are very pretty. Inside the railings of the street will be placed the Statue of the late Queen Empress of India, presented to his fellow-citizens by Mr James Skinner, a grandson of Colonel Skinner, C.B. Further back are the Municipal Buildings, and a museum with a number of objects of much interest.

In the gardens is also one of the restored stone elephants which stood before the Delhi Gate of the Fort. Through the middle of them runs the channel of the tail of the Western Jumna Canal, the water of which was held up at places along its course in reservoirs.

Continuing down the Chandni Chauk to the end we reach the Fatahpur Masjid, nearly a mile from the Lahore Gate of the fort. This was built by one of the wives of the Emperor Shah Jahan in 1650 A.D.; from 1857 till the visit of His Majesty to Delhi in 1876, it was devoted to secular purposes, but was then restored to the Muhammadan community as a place of worship. The eastern portion of the enclosure is occupied by a garden and a tank and some graves; on the western side rises a well-proportioned mosque building, surmounted by a single dome of black and white stripes.

From the front of the mosque one broad street leads along the south side to the Lal Kua Bazar, while the Lahore Bazar, which is the principal grain market of Delhi, leads past the north side to the Lahore Gate of the city. The road to the right leading along the west end of the Queen’s Gardens takes us to the main road from the Railway Station to the Kabul Gate, and turning to the right short of this crosses the Dufferin Bridge to the Mori Gate and the Civil Station, outside the northern wall of the city.

The fine, native house on the left of the main road across the canal, now occupied by the Cambridge Mission, was once the mansion of Nawab Safdar Jang and the Nawab Wazirs of Oudh.