We were stunned. We did not know which way to turn. If the Viceroy had been killed we knew what would follow. Just a few yards on the left side of the gurdwara separated by a police station was the Sunehri Masjid. It was from this mosque that Nadir Shah had ordered the massacre of the citizens of Delhi because someone had fired on him. The sahibs were slow to anger but once their temper was roused their wrath could be terrible. After suppressing the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, they had hanged hundreds of people in this very Chandni Chowk and blown up a whole bazaar with its shops and mansions in front of the Royal Mosque. We shut the gates of the gurdwara and collected round the
Granth
Sahib
to listen to recitations of the Guru’s words. The city awaited its fate.
We waited till it was dark before we slipped out of the gurdwara. There were no
tongas
or
ekkas
available and we had to walk home in the dark through deserted streets. My father kept muttering, ‘
Wah Guru!
Wah Guru!’
all the way.
I could not get much sleep that night. What would happen if the Viceroy had been killed? Would they still go ahead with building a new Delhi? After this experience would the English ever trust any Indian?
It was from the morning paper that we learnt the truth of what had transpired. A bomb had been hurled from the roof of a bank building. It had killed the Viceroy’s umbrella-bearer, and grievously wounded the Viceroy who had been immediately taken to hospital by car. The Viceroy’s personal servant had also been injured. The Vicereine and another servant on the same elephant were unhurt. The ceremony at the Red Fort had taken place nonetheless with Mr Fleetwood Wilson reading the proclamation on behalf of the Viceroy.
Lord Hardinge who till then had thought of little else but the new city lost interest in the project. It took him a long time to recover from his injuries. He became impatient with Lutyens’s grandiose plans and began to turn to Herbert Baker for advice. The Vicereine who did her best to keep up her husband’s enthusiasm took Lutyens’s side. Then she fell ill and had to be taken back to England for a major operation. She died soon after surgery. By then the papers were full of rumours of a war breaking out in Europe. Who would think of building a city while fighting a war? If England lost there would be no New Delhi.
In August 1914 England declared war on Germany. Lord Hardinge read the proclamation on behalf of India. Malcolm Hailey sent for my father. His note said that he should bring me with him. He was very friendly and very clear in his message. ‘Sujan Singh (that being father’s name) you know India is at war with Germany. We will need a lot of fighting men to go to the front. You come from a region which has some of the best soldiers in the country. You go back to Hadali and recruit men for the army. You will be well rewarded.’
My father assured Hailey that he would do his very best and pray to God that England would be victorious.
We divided the work between us. I looked after the business in Delhi. My father toured villages in district Shahpur. He did not have much difficulty in raising recruits as there were lots of young lads with nothing to do. They were mostly Baluch Muslims with relations serving in the army. He also managed to persuade some Sikhs to enlist. From our tiny hamlet, Hadali, with barely two hundred families living in it, he raised four hundred and thirty-seven men for war. He sent me their names so that I could show them to Hailey. I had no problem getting more contracts on very favourable terms. Hailey also promised to let us buy as much land in New Delhi as we could afford as the government wanted private people to share the burden of building the new city by opening shops, restaurants, hotels and cinemas.
While the war was on, no major construction work could be undertaken. The Viceroy devoted his energies towards winning the war. He travelled all over India and the Middle East. His mind was also distracted by tragedies that occurred in his family. After his wife’s death, his elder son was mortally wounded in a battle in France. Three of his adcs were killed within a few months.
The war that the British had expected to win in a few months dragged on and on. They were not as invincible as we had come to believe. Although thousands of our men were fighting on their side, we Indians being what we are, we secretly enjoyed the reverses suffered by them. Whenever the topic of war came up, someone or the other would always quote an Urdu poet: ‘The English are victorious but it is the Germans who capture territory.’
Lord Hardinge was persuaded to stay on for another six months after his tenure as Viceroy was over. Lord Chelmsford who succeeded him as Viceroy showed even less interest in the capital project than his predecessor had in his later days. It was also known that Lutyens and Baker had fallen out and did not speak to each other. It was difficult to believe that two of the best-known architects of the world could get so worked up over trivial matters like the comparative levels of the Viceregal palace and the Secretariats and the incline of the road running through the Secretariats to the palace. Lutyens wanted the palace to be on a higher level and the gradient of the road at such an angle that the palace could be seen from a long distance. Baker wanted both buildings to be on the same level with the road rising gently so that the palace came into view when you were halfway up the incline. The matter was put to Hardinge who sided with Baker. It was again put to Chelmsford who took the easier line of agreeing with his predecessor. To me (I was taking private tution in English), it seemed a good example of making a mountain of a mole hill. All that Lutyens wanted was a foot-and-a half change in the angle of the approach road. They called it ‘the battle of the gradient’. It was also an example of building castles in the air as even the foundations of the buildings had not been dug.
The longer the war dragged on the more restive Indian politicians became. They were Banias and lawyers who had not raised their little fingers to help our fighting men but were the loudest in demanding more self-government which would give them greater privileges. Chelmsford being a weak man gave in. He wrote to his government in London that more power should be entrusted to Indians. A thirty-eight-year-old Jew, Edwin Montagu, came to India in November 1917 to study the situation. He stayed nearly six months. Between the two they prepared an elaborate scheme of reforms which came to be known as dyarchy. In the provinces more departments would be administered by elected members; in the centre three of the Viceroy’s six councillors would be Indians. The princes were to have a chamber of their own. All this was to await the successful termination of the war.
The war suddenly came to an end in November 1918. It was the time to reap the harvest of rewards promised to us. We did better than we had hoped for. We were granted large tracts of land in the canal colonies of the Punjab. I was given the choice of plots I wanted to buy in New Delhi. When tenders were invited for the main buildings, I bagged the South Block of the Secretariat, the War Memorial Arch and many clerks’ quarters. My father, who was by now an older and a mellower man, was honoured with the title of Sardar Sahib. While he was still alive, I became virtually the head of the family. I let my younger brother look after our lands and properties in the Punjab and devoted myself wholly to building work and making money to realize my ambition of having my own car to drive to the Qutub Minar.
The end of four years of war did not bring peace to India. We had more peace during the war and more turmoil when the war ended. I saw some of it with my own eyes because I had been made an honorary magistrate and was often summoned by the Deputy Commissioner to be present with the police when there was trouble in the city.
A new leader appeared on the scene, Gandhi. He even got Muslims to join Hindus in anti-government agitations. At this time there was a lot of misery caused by an influenza epidemic which killed millions of people and famine caused by a succession of poor harvests. On top of all this Gandhi demanded that since the war was over, the government must give up powers it had assumed for the prosecution of the war. Even more mischievous was his supporting Muslims in their demand that the victorious British keep their hands off the Turkish empire of the Caliph. What did Turkey or the Caliphate mean to Hindus or Sikhs who together formed over eighty per cent of the population of India? But the trick worked. I saw Hindus and Muslims drinking water from the same water booths, marching through the bazaars arm in arm chanting
Hindu-Muslim Bhai-bhai
—Hindus and Muslims are brothers. Muslims invited a Hindu, Shradhanand, to address their Friday congregation in the Royal Mosque. The government quite rightly forbade Gandhi from entering Delhi. The fellow then tried to go to the Punjab where trouble was brewing in many towns and cities including Lahore and Amritsar. This encouraged the Amir of Afghanistan, Shah Amanullah, to plan on invading India. The government dealt with the situation with an iron hand. For three weeks I was on duty almost the entire day and night helping the police disperse agitated mobs. In Amritsar General Dyer fired on an illegal assembly at Jallianwala Bagh killing over three hundred and fifty people and wounding over a thousand. The province was placed under martial law. Mischiefmakers were flogged in public, their properties were confiscated and their leaders exiled. As for Amanullah, before he could mount an invasion, he was toppled from his throne. 1919 and 1920 were certainly very bad years for India. But they were the beginning of the realization of my dreams.
Nothing deterred the government from going ahead with building the new city. A narrow gauge rail-line was laid from village Badarpur, twenty miles south of Delhi, ending in what is today Connaught Circus. It was named the Imperial Delhi Railway. It was meant to transport red gravel, sandstone and rubble to the building site. Two huge sheds were raised under which stone-cutting machines were installed; thousands of stone-cutters were hired to chisel stone and marble to required shapes. Over 50,000 men and women from Bangardesh were employed as labourers. My own staff consisted of over fifty
munshis
and accountants and a labour force of over 3000. While politicians did their
buk buk
in their legislatures, often criticizing the capital project as a criminal waste of money, we went ahead raising a new city the like of which India had not known.
By the winter of 1920 the situation had taken a turn for the better. I had my family (by then consisting of my wife, three sons and a daughter) living with me in Delhi though my father had decided to go back and live on the land with my younger brother. Although I could afford to buy a car I was uncertain of my father’s reaction—he was dead-set against such wasteful extravagance. Instead I bought a four-wheeled victoria and a horse to take my children to school in Daryaganj and then take me round the different building sites. I seldom got back before 10 p.m. Sometimes after a day’s work I would go and visit my friends where I would take a whisky or two and listen to
mujras
performed by prostitutes from Chawri Bazaar. I would never have dared to do this if my father had been living with me in Delhi.
I built myself a double-storeyed house in Jantar Mantar Road where half-a-dozen other Sikh contractors had also built their houses. Although I was earning more than them, they spent more on themselves than I. One of them who had got the contract for the supply of stone and marble built himself a palatial mansion of stone and marble bigger than any private residence in Delhi. Another whose father had been a dacoit and was not doing half as well as I, acquired two cars.
One summer I received a telegram from my brother saying that father had been taken ill and I should come over as soon as 1 could. At the time they were living in Mian Channun where my brother was running a cotton ginning factory and had over two hundred squares of land. He had persuaded the railway authorities to name the nearest railway station after my father as Kot Sujan Singh. I arrived in Mian Channun just in time. It almost seemed as if my father had been waiting to see me before taking his leave from the world. No sooner I went to his bedside, he began to question me about the business. He was short of breath but refused to listen to the doctor who kept insisting he should not strain himself. He broke down and cried that he was leaving my brother and I an uncleared debt of one lakh rupees. We assured him that if that bothered him either of us could wipe it out within one minute by writing a cheque in favour of his creditors as between us we had assets of about one hundred lakhs. ‘That may be so,’ he replied amid gasps, ‘but before leaving the world a person should balance his account by repaying every loan he has taken. He began to cry because he was very weak. We cried because he was crying. Then he asked everyone save my mother and brother to leave the room. ‘I want you two brothers to make me a promise in the presence of your mother that you will stick together and share everything no matter what profits or losses the other incurs.’ We brothers embraced each other and bowed over his chest to let him put his arms over us. Being a man of the world he added, ‘And if you ever decide to partition the family property you will do it amicably without anyone in the world knowing about it. If you have any dispute, you will accept your mother’s verdict without question.’ My mother who had been pressing his feet all this time broke down and began to wail. ‘Don’t talk of leaving me. The doctors say you will be all right. The great Guru will give you good health.’
The doctors gave him different medicines but the Guru closed his account book. Half-an-hour later he sat up and looked around as if he wanted something. He opened his mouth very wide as if he was yawning and with a gasp sank back on his pillow and stopped breathing. My mother closed his eyes with her hands and wailed the lament for the dead: ‘My light is the name of the one Lord; its oil is sorrow.’
The news quickly spread to the town. Within an hour it seemed as if the entire population of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims had come to share our grief. Professional women mourners came in groups beating their breasts and singing litanies in praise of the departed. That afternoon his cortege decorated with coloured strips of paper and balloons was led by the town band followed by over 2000 mourners. Mothers made their children walk under the bier so that they could live as long as he. In our family it was customary not to mourn the death of an old person but celebrate it as release from the world’s bondage. My father was sixty-five when he died.