Travel Plan: Visit Chandni Chowk: The Moonlit Indian Bazaar Seeped in Ancient History

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 Hi traveller,

If you admire lived history and local culture, Chandni Chowk in New Delhi is your ultimate destination. The narrow lanes of this vast market stand seeped in the legacy of trade and commerce spanning centuries. Markets are the most vibrant and lively locations in any civilisation. Local markets give you the most authentic experience of this vast country, India. The multi-fashioned and multi-flavoured markets, immense in size and produce, and filled to the brim with people and their sounds, present a chaotic yet intricate experience of India's scintillating diversity. In such a place, you view life in its beautiful bountifulness. It is a place where all your senses are invited to participate, there are multitudinous sights of life pictures to see, sounds to listen to, scents to inhale and delight in, and the voluptuous touch of food and coveted consumer items.

Chandni Chowk

If you visit India, your experience of this country will never be complete without visiting Chandni Chowk, also known as Dureeba. This is the ancient market built by the Mughal princess, Jahanara Begum, the unmarried scion of the great Emperor Shah Jahan, and an intelligent and industrious woman who wanted to leave her mark as an efficient and strong princess. The market is designed as an avenue beginning from the western gate of the Red Fort, the erstwhile fort of the Mughal capital, and was originally divided into two lanes of shops, separated by a canal that reflected moonlight in the night. The name, Chandni Chowk, derives from this idea of a market that stands bathing in moonlight, Chandni meaning moon, and Chowk meaning an intersection of roads. The canal is closed now and the original half-moon shape of the market is lost to the test of time, conflicts and wars, and the multitudinous new structural additions and modifications to the market.

The Market of Moonlight

Delhi-based Scottish historian and author, William Dalrymple was disappointed to see Chandni Chowk for the first time, the moonlit market of his literary explorations, in a congested and dilapidated state- its once wide avenues crowded with street food vendors, litter, and broken sewage channels, its sales counters no more selling jasper, and mother-of-pearl, and its labyrinthine narrow streets meandering through sweating crowds, stray cows, and the smell of dirt and urine. His expectations were full of the Bactrian camels, cinnamon logs, and Mughal era grandeur of the 'great boulevard’. Dalrymple finds the charm gone yet the human saga still flowing in full force.

Innumerable poems and travel stories of history abound with tales of this market,  once compared to the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore of Paris. In 1650, this market was built, adding magnificence to the new city of Shahjahanabad built by Shah Jahan, which later became India’s capital, New Delhi. The luxuriously laid out water canal, avenue trees, and the three distinct sections of the market are no longer in existence.

James Fergusson, the Scottish architectural historian in his book, ‘History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, Volume 2’, draws a lively picture of this majestic market,

“...a noble wide street, nearly a mile long, planted with two rows of trees, and with a stream of water running down its centre. Entering within its deeply-recessed portal, you find yourself beneath the vaulted wall the sides of which are in two storeys and with an octagonal break in the centre. This hall, which is 375 ft in length overall, has very much the effect of the nave of a gigantic gothic cathedral, and forms the noblest entrance known to belong to any existing palace.” (Fergusson, 1876, p.591).

To have an even earlier peek into this place, one could read the book, ‘Daughters of the Sun’, written by Ira Mukhoty. In this book, she notes that there were 1560 shops in this market during the time of Jahanara Begum and Emperor Shah Jahan. The world-renowned Mughal market had traders from Arabia, Yemen, Syria, China, Turkey, and Iraq. “Rubies from Badakshan, pearls from Oman and fresh fruits from Kashmir'' were among the goods sold there and the variety of the items for sale ranged from camels and horses to perfumes and weapons (Mukhoty, 2018, p.188).

Mukhoty writes,

“Later in the evening, the young gallants of the city will wander by in freshly perfumed jamas (pyjamas), paan (betel leaf, areca nut, and a minute quantity of lime mixed with perfumes and spices which is chewed by people) tucked inside their cheeks, ostensibly exchanging verse of poetry but furtively keeping a watchful eye on the famed courtesans who can sometimes be glimpsed from the latticed windows of the first floor kothis.” (Mukhoty, 2018, p.189).

Watch a video on Chandni Chowk here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvRubb1vKhs 

The Last Procession of Dara Shikoh

Dara Shikoh was Shah Jahan's son, the prince chosen by his father as successor but defeated, captured and put to death by his brother Aurangazeb. When Aurangazeb imprisoned Shah Jahan and declared himself the next Emperor, Dara fled with his family, only to be brought back and paraded through the entire length of Chandni Chowk as a traitor. Wearing dirty clothes and mounted on a dirty undecorated elephant, the young prince became a sad spectacle making the onlookers cry and scream in despair as he was an amicable and benevolent prince for the lower strata of the populace. He was executed later by the orders of the new Emperor, Aurangazeb.

The Massacre of Chandni Chowk

Fast forward to 1738, we see the great Mughal empire touching its rock bottom and being conquered by the Persian ruler, Nadir Shah. Other than plundering the colossal wealth of the Mughals, Nadir Shah also ordered the massacre of the then-Delhi population. He sat at a marble platform that was part of the Sunehri Masjid, the Golden Mosque, of Chandni Chowk and bore witness to around a hundred thousand people being executed by his order. The date was February 11, 1738. The slaughter commenced at 8 a.m. and ended only at 3 in the afternoon. One contemporary historian of Nadir Shah, James Fraser, described the scene in the following words,

“On Thursday the 15th, as the great number of dead bodies that lay about the castle, and in the bazaars, and other places, caused a very offensive stench, they pressed most of the people they met within the streets and employed them in removing the bodies. Some by tying cords to the feet, they dragged without the city, from they threw into the river, and those whom they imagined to be Hindus they piled forty or fifty of their bodies a-top of each other, and burnt them with the timber of the demolished buildings.” (Fraser, 1742, p.189)

The first gate to the left of Chandni Chowk came to be known as ‘Khooni Darwaza’, meaning, gate of blood, after this incident.

Nadir Shah took away the Mughal's entire jewel collection including the famous Kohinoor diamond and the magnificent peacock throne, this diamond adorned.

The 1857 Mutiny and Chandni Chowk

Halfway down the avenue of Chandni Chowk, Jahanara Begum had also built a huge caravanserai, a place of rest for wayfarers, which was destroyed in 1857, after Indian soldiers in the British army, both Hindus and Muslims, rose against the British rule, in the first massive act of defiance against the colonial presence. Manucci, the traveller historian of those times, has described his wonder at the beauty and elegance of the caravanserai of Chandni Chowk, surrounded by gardens, fountains, and inlaid with elaborate artwork in sandstone and marble. When the mutiny was suppressed, the Britishers were angry at the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah, who at that time was just an old man with no power and courage to lead the mutineers, but who was all the same declared their leader by them, just by a stroke of chance. The British avenged this passive involvement of Bahadur Shah in the mutiny by banishing him to Burma and razing to the ground many beautiful structures inside the Red Fort and the then capital city of Shahjahanabad. The caravanserai of Chandni Chowk also fell in this act of revenge.

A book published in 1865, by Henry George Keene, a historian of mediaeval India, and titled, ‘The Handbook for Delhi: ’, described the Chandni Chowk of that era as “dirty picturesque”. In the evenings, he strolled in the market and saw small shops lit by “chirags’, oil burners made of mud in the shape of semi-folded palms. He described the comb-makers at work, ghee vendors, the local chemists with small cabinets and herbs, surrounded by their patients, fruit and vegetable vendors, money changers, lace makers, gold beaters, stone cutters and many more artisans and traders. With wonder, he remarks “In few streets of the world is there such a strange and busy stream of life.” (Keene, 1865, p.125).

Chandni Chowk was already in decline. The colonisers understood it only as a remnant of the Mughal India that they conquered. It did not suit or occur to them to see Chandni Chowk as a space of thriving material culture, living history, and an architectural marvel. The British officers who ordered the demolition of the many palaces of Red Fort and the caravanserai of Chandni Chowk after the 1857 mutiny gave specific instructions not to spare anything for their historic or architectural value.

Today’s Chandni Chowk still amazes its visitors with its labyrinthine bylanes, the immensity of its diverse goods on sale, and the historic ruins of the ancient monuments of mediaeval India popping to view here and there. The crowd flows incessantly in and out of it.

A few walls of the old havelis (feudal houses) remain, crumbling under the scorching heat of Delhi, in the summer days. The doves that have made the windows and cracks of these walls their home, coos and flap their wings in heightened alarm, whenever the mild earthquakes regularly felt in Delhi happen again. The market stands and lives on, impervious to the major and minor vagaries of time that it has witnessed since its birth.

References

James Fraser, 1742, The History of Nadir Shah: Formerly Called Thamas Kuli Khan, the Present Emperor of Persia, Original text from University of Minnesota.

James Fergusson, 1876, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, Volume 2, J. Murray.

Henry George Keene, 1865, The Handbook for Delhi, T.C. McCarthy.

Ira Mukhoty, 2018, Daughters of the Sun, Aleph Book Company.


https://www.brokenbangles.com/2024/11/travel-plan-visit-himalayas-and.html 


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