Delhiwale: Oh Rangila re!

Being Delhiwale, we people do know something of the Mughals. Babar was the first. Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal. Aurangzeb… well, the less said the better! Zafar was the last Mughal. But who came immediately after Aurangzeb? Who was immediately before Zafar? In all, there were 12 emperors between Aurangzeb and Zafar. The most notable among these lesser-knowns lies buried in our city, but his grave chamber stays deserted.

Raushan Akhtar Muhammad Shah ruled for 29 years, from 1719 to 48. His daily life was full of leisure—watching partridge and elephant fights in the morning, and mime artists and jugglers in the evening. Often attired in a woman’s tunic and pearl-embroidered shoes, he was known as Rangila, the colourful. But don’t belittle the man’s majesty. His Red Fort facilitated an extraordinary cultural resurgence. Delhi strutted in style and snobbery. The city swelled with poets and painters, musicians and dancers. While opportunistic Mughal subahdars were forcing down their own dynasties in Bengal, Awadh, etc, and determined Marathas were crushing the Mughals in the south, Rangila’s carefree Dilli was frolicking in the rangili aspects of life. The shaayars penned couplets in Chandni Chowk tea houses, the tawaifs danced kathak in Chawri Bazar’s kothas, and at the centre of it all was Rangila, striving hard to deserve his colourful notoriety. One 18th century painting, in the custody of the British Library, rendered by an artist called Chitarman, depicts Rangila in a situation so intimate that… well, Google it on your mobile when no one’s around!

That said, life’s never an endless picnic, even for the kings. Rangila’s rangrelias were rudely disrupted when Nadir Shah invaded Delhi in 1739. The Persian king massacred thousands of Delhiwale in Chandni Chowk, before robbing us off the legendary Peacock Throne, plus the Koh-i-Noor diamond.

Today, Rangila’s roofless tomb in central Delhi remains desolate although it lies within the crowded shrine of Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. Walls of stone screen keep it in isolation from the rest of the dargah. The marble enclosure is littered with six more graves, two of which are so tiny that they must contain infants. One night, a cat was sitting snugly upon the emperor’s grave. This afternoon, dargah pilgrims outside the grave chamber’s arched entrance are walking to-and-fro with no regard for Rangila.

PS: Some of the information in this dispatch is sourced from the website of New York’s Asia Society.