Imagine Safdar Jung

 The following is from an old Facebook post that I had written about 6 years back. While scrolling down my own wall in search of an old post, I chanced upon this. While I couldn’t find the post I was initially looking for, I thought let’s revisit this forgotten piece of writing.


Imagine Safdar Jung 

Safdar Jung must be some 270 years old now. How long has he been buried in Delhi? He wonders, why Delhi? Why did his son have to associate his last memory with the later Mughal tradition? Why did he not get buried in Awadh?

Safdar Jung is not very impressed with the bulbous domes sheltering him. These are nothing new--a seventeenth century Mughal emperor had already used these forms for a monument in Agra, more popular than his tomb site. What is so unique about them? He is disgusted with the lack of symmetry and proportions at places. Couldn't his son commission a better group of architects? Why was the mosque built at the eastern end? He does not know. He feels helpless and sad.

Safdar Jung wishes the fountains were functional today and the streams had more water. He wishes his son could have planned a different kind of garden--not the usual "chaharbagh" of the Mughals. He wishes how the tomb could have been built away from the site of a bloody war. He wishes it was away from the Bagh-i-jud , snatching away half of his visitors. 

But there are better things to look at. Let him enjoy the sight of the few Ber trees that are still preserved in the gardens. Let him enjoy the chirp of birds and the laughter of school children playing games and running all around his resting place, while their teachers and guardians make a sullen face, having lost a day's peace.

Safdar Jung is very old. He cannot walk out of his tomb and climb down the stairs. What he can see from his tombstone seat is this: children playing at a distance in the Mughal  garden, and the twenty-first century world appropriating his memory in their own unique ways. The world is changing around him. These children remind him of his own grandchildren. Some of them would have fought a bloody war of succession at one time to get the throne. He does not want to remember that horrifying past, though.


He cherishes these lines inscribed at the gateway to his tombstone :


" When the hero of plain bravery departs from the transitory, may he become a resident of god’s paradise".


Stay well, Safdar Jung.

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