A place’s atmosphere, its ambience, its ‘mahaul,’
is like the collective aura of all its stories.
Ask anyone to tell you what happened here, they’ll probably say:
This is the birthplace of Delhi, Indraprastha, the fabled city spoken of in the Mahabharat written 2,000 years ago.
This is also the spot where Humayun, after hearing the call to prayer from atop his library (there behind you) tripped coming down the stairs and fell to his death.
But this is also where 175,000 Muslims crowded together after partition, waiting for safe passage to Pakistan, a time that was so violent that officials had to ask foreign missionaries to dig the camp’s latrines because they were afraid that if the refugees were asked to do it, they would just take the matics and shovels outside the gates and use them to murder Hindus.
I only know this because one of these American missionaries digging latrines in the Purana Qila, during the first of his 36 years in India, was my mother’s father, Donald E. Rugh - a man who would go on to enjoy an unusual level of success in India.
But which of these stories is the one that gets told, and by whom? If you believe there is value in trying to portray and convey the complexities of sometimes extremely localized spaces, then you also know that all stories, no matter how seemingly insignificant, add texture to the gestalt and need to be considered.
As Lefevbre notes:
"How many maps, in the descriptive or geographical sense, might be needed to deal exhaustively with a given space, to code and decode all its meanings and contents? It is doubtful whether a finite number can ever be given to this sort of question.
“What we are most likely confronted with here is a sort of instant infinity, a situation reminiscent of a Mondrian painting
We are confronted not by one social space but by many indeed, by an unlimited multiplicity or unaccountable set of social spaces.”
Infinite infinity is a mess.
A shahr ashob is one type of container for said mess.
These poems celebrate specific 'places' as complex universes in and of themselves:
In the ocean of the world, this was an extraordinary shore,
From the dust of which all the people used to sift out pearls.
~ Sauda - Mukhammas on the Desolation of Shahjahanbad
It is a poetic form about a once beloved urban ecology that is dying.
Through yearning for an idealized past, the city poet uses a shahr ashob to grapple with the raw details of contemporary life as they are being experienced on street-level.
And because shahr ashobs respond to actual events, these poems are like echoes of the city’s troubled emotional history -
lyrical records
of the most dramatic arcs of change
happening to a city
at the time they were written.