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Saturday 22 November 2008

No better way to turn 70 than in the Darjeeling hills

Christopher Booker launches his eighth decade in India with a spot of street cricket, a return to his mother’s birthplace and a salute to a country reclaiming its historical pre-eminence

For all but 60 of the past 500 years India was held together by two groups of foreign invaders. From the early 16th century to the mid-18th, the rule of the Muslim Mughal emperors from central Asia unfolded like a great tragedy. Its high point was the reign of Akbar, one of history’s great rulers, an administrative genius, an illiterate scholar who saw all faiths as different ways of approaching the same truth, proclaiming religious tolerance throughout his empire. The turn to tragedy began under his grandson Shah Jahan, whose most enduring legacy, the world’s most famous building, is an exquisite, perfect image, surprisingly large (at 240 feet, the Taj Mahal is taller than most cathedrals) but inside curiously lifeless, a monument to death. For eight years Jahan was imprisoned and eventually murdered by his son Aurangzeb, one of history’s great monsters, whose 50-year tyranny prefaced the decline of the Mughals and the rise of that second external power which was to dominate India until our own time.

Sixty years on from independence, as the darker side of the Raj fades into history, it is intriguing to see how Indians have come to appreciate the lighter side of its huge legacy, from the rule of law to irrigation schemes. The name changes of three of India’s four major cities (two of them among the three largest in the world) may have been intended to symbolise the emergence of a new, post-British India, but as one businessman put it to me with a twinkle, ‘Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai are only names for the front of buses. We still talk about them as Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.’ In Curzon’s white marble Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, an Edwardian pastiche of the Taj Mahal crossed with St Paul’s, a series of 1860s oil paintings of the city show why it was regarded as ‘the most elegant in the Empire’. The great vistas and colossal buildings of Lutyens’s New Delhi convey why he himself observed that such an architectural expression of imperial power would only be possible ‘under a despotism’, reminding William Dalrymple of Speer’s plans for Hitler’s rebuilding of Berlin. The Viceroy’s palace may be larger than Versailles but it has made a seamless transition to the presidential palace of an independent democratic India.

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