Within / Without

Today, after a long and hot spell, London saw a light shower in the evening. A drizzle really. We walked outside and there was that faint smell of mud that is tinged so sharp with memory, yearning and footprints that remembering Delhi is near impossible. And so, while digging up some favourite links at the wonderful site of The Annual of Urdu Studies that has archives in pdf files, (someone please tell them to blog.) I caught hold of this – Ghalib’s Delhi:A Shamelessly Revisionist Look at Two Popular Metaphors. (pdf file). From the paper

The altered image of a last remaining candle about to go out was not only unambiguous in evoking a finality and doom, it simultaneously implied very strongly that life in the Delhi of the first half of the nineteenth century was not radically different from the days of the great Mughals, that it was illumined not by anything new but only by the last remaining candle of the multitude that had burned bright in the preceding three centuries, and that a radical and wide-ranging change took place only after the Revolt of 1857.
…
To conclude, it may perhaps be more accurate to say that experientially there had really been two Delhis for Ghalib, one of the time before May 1857 and the other of after October 1857, the two separated by the traumatic days of the Revolt and its brutal aftermath.

Sigh! Enjoy.

How odd it is to be nostalgic for a century that was over eight decades before I was born. But nostalgia, like nausea – comes out of the blue, overwhelms and passes by.

Posted on August 1st, 2006 by Neha Viswanathan
Filed under: Borrowed Words, Cities, History and Monuments