Vivid portrayal of life in Mughal-era Delhi

The writer uses her deep knowledge of Dilli’s multiple pasts to best effect in this second novel in a projected quartet centred on the city.

The three sultans who made up the Lodi dynasty figure through much of the book, as do the structures that have immortalised them in what is now known as the Lodi Gardens in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: KRISHNAN VV

Madhulika Liddle is well-known for her creation, Muzaffar Jung, a detective in mid-17th century Mughal Delhi. Through novels and short stories centred on him, Liddle has painted an animated picture of life in Shah Jahan’s capital. Her current project is more ambitious and on a much wider canvas. An Unholy Drought is the second novel in a projected quartet that will span the history of a single family living in Delhi—or Dilli—and the wider region around it for about eight centuries, from the time of the Delhi Sultans, through the Mughals and their decline, up to Partition in 1947.

An Unholy Drought covers about a century and a half of this period: from the end of the 14th century to the mid-16th. Two events, therefore, bookend this novel: the 1398 invasion of north India and the capture of Delhi by the Central Asian conqueror Timur; and the 1556 battle of Panipat, which saw the Mughals, nominally under the boy king Akbar, defeat the Hindu general Hemu and the Indo-Afghan tribes and armies that supported him.

An Unholy Drought

By Madhulika Liddle

Speaking Tiger

Pages: 384

Price: Rs.599

Liddle positions her cast of characters, loosely connected by familial ties, within this chronology and traces their and their descendants’ journey over the next century and a half. This is through the excitements of intra-dynastic and intra-tribal conflicts in the Delhi Sultanate as the Lodis gradually crumble before Mughal King Babur, and then the Mughals themselves are evicted from India by an Indo-Afghan dynasty founded by Sher Shah which, in turn, is supplanted a few decades later, in 1556, by the returning Mughals led by Emperor Humayun.

Art of embroidery

Danish, his nephew Qasim, Qasim’s wife, Aabida, their son Aslam, his son Zubair, and others are a family of skilled crafts people, essentially embroiderers but also calligraphers. Their exceptional skill and commercial success occasionally push them into the margins of minor nobility, but in essence they are owners and managers of karkhanas (factories) producing exceptionally well-crafted goods for the royal family and the nobles. So, details of the art of producing fine embroidery and calligraphy are a part of this family story and find frequent mention in the narrative.

The family’s evolution intersects on occasion with political conflicts. Thus Danish, a professional letter-writer, finds himself jailed, suspected of being a conspirator in a largely imagined plot against the kotwal (chief of police). Three-quarters of a century later, Zubair, Danish’s great grandnephew, finds himself involuntarily mixed up in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Sikandar Lodi, the reigning sultan. It takes all the ingenuity of his wife Shabana—and some amount of literary ingenuity on the part of Liddle—to extricate him from certain capital punishment.

An Unholy Drought is the second novel in a projected quartet that will span the history of a single family living in Delhi. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Through the eyes of this extended family, we witness Ibrahim Lodi’s defeat by the Mughal Babur, hitherto the King of Kabul but intent on appropriating what he felt was his ancestor Timur’s legacy in India. Through these plots and subplots runs another narrative thread: the quest, for some members of the family, to find a frieze, “The Garden of Heaven” (also the title of the first book of the quartet), which is a family heirloom. Danish is forced to sell it to escape a long term of imprisonment, and recovering it becomes the mission for subsequent generations of the family. Towards the end of the book, the possibility emerges that “The Garden of Heaven” is as much a metaphor as it is an object, a metaphor for Delhi itself. If this is slightly mystifying, presumably the subsequent volumes will clarify the issue.

Heart of Dilli

Geographically, An Unholy Drought spreads itself across the Sultanate’s footprints in north India: Delhi, Lahore, Sirhind, and Agra are the principal locations that Liddle populates with her cast. However, it is Dilli that dominates the novel, enabling Liddle to use her deep knowledge of the city’s multiple pasts to best effect. Even in the mid-15th century, there were multiple layers to Delhi’s past as each ruling dynasty left its mark on the city’s geography: Mehrauli, Lalkot, Siri, Jahanpanah, Chiragh-i-Dilli, Khizrabad, and Mubarakabad are some of the locales in which different episodes and acts of the novel play themselves out.

Scattered through the book is also a fair amount of anecdotal historical detail. The three sultans who made up the Lodi dynasty figure through much of the book, as do the structures that have immortalised them in what is now known as the Lodi Gardens in New Delhi. The last of the Lodis, Ibrahim, is buried not here but in Panipat, where he fell in battle against Babur’s armies. His mother, unreconciled to the defeat, tried to poison Babur but was unsuccessful. She finally chose suicide to being forced to live with the Mughal ladies, no doubt a wise choice. Liddle’s narrative drily notes: “The baadshah’s ladies, feisty warrior women that they were, would not spare her. Death at her own hands was preferable.”

Liddle’s prose is smooth and fluent and brings out the locations and personalities well. However, the wide cast of major and minor characters is bewildering at times. Synoptic overviews situated in 1556 but looking backwards, in the form of separate chapters titled “Interludes” give a chronological time frame, but this helps only partially. The historical note at the end is useful too, but the story sometimes requires a stretch of the imagination to sustain itself.

Ranjana Sengupta is an editor and author of Delhi Metropolitan: The Making of an Unlikely City.