Staking the snake: on seeing, knowing & other imaginations

[H]ow can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into—by the way of solitude, utter solitude without a policeman—by the way of silence, utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard..?

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Not knowing is a kind of compass.

John Keats

I.

I am looking for correspondences, not answers.

After twenty-one years in the city, I decide to take guided walking tours of its heritage monuments. The first is of the Qutub Minar complex. Some physicists argue that ‘time passes more slowly for your feet than it does for your head’ (Carlo Rovelli). I want to catch up with myself. To find lost time.

The year is 2022. My seven-year contract with a magazine has ended. I have quit. My friendships have turned from places of refuge to ghostly ruins. Any passion I had for writing, my calling since childhood, has burrowed deep underground like the serpent king fleeing the sacrificial fire. 

For seven years, I have been a tenant of what Tibetan Buddhists call the Milam Bardo – a state between waking and sleeping, a domain of dreams and nightmares. Running in ordained ruts, I have just woken up a stranger to self and city.

Time has been unfaltering in its slippage. And yet I am stranded, my days are losing shape.

2022 is the X that marks the rupture between the past and the present. So, I turn to other histories and ruins, to sites of greater meaning and order than my life, and in keeping to my feet through their stories attempt to travel beyond my own geography. To walk between what I read as ruin and restoration, monument and meaning.

II

The first walk, an evening in August, is through the well-known Qutub complex in Mehrauli. More than a simple tourist attraction, its history of ambition, calamity and collaboration, told through red sandstone and grey quartzite, through kufic and naqsh, bells and flowers,  turns it into a metaphor for the city itself.

Its epicenter is the Qutub Minar – the tallest brick minaret in the world. I see most people linger in the dusk, awed by the Minar’s architectural ambition and beauty. It is an exclamation mark on the Mehrauli landscape, dotted by the ellipses of temple spolia and the period that is the Alai Minar, a monument to unmet ambition.

On that walk, I lag behind the group. The dates and names rattling in the distance are like crackling static. The day is on its last legs, and I am seeking a deeper contact with the material before me,  trying to clear the debris inside my head which is littered with spolia of what came before.

Do they see me as a site of correspondences, of meanings unmade?

Moments later, when the lights come on, the Qutub Minar does not compel my attention. Yet its grandstanding makes me squint. But I take photos – like every tourist in this city, like a stranger to it. Then the group walks around Delhi’s first mosque, built in the 13th century, making its way to the Iron Pillar.

In the dark, I cannot tell whether the structure is made of iron or stone. The walk leader gestures at an identifying inscription. I pretend to see. The cannonball markings, the metal scars, are harder to miss. Points are made about the pillar too. It seems to exist in a deeper time. I wonder how many miracles it has taken to bring this ancient artefact here? Where X marks the spot? And how many have kept it away from the glass case of an unapologetic museum abroad? I do not ask the pillar these questions just yet, I think…

Here we are in the aftermath.

After the group bids its goodbyes, it is obvious, that I cannot just visit this site once. Unable to hear it over other echoes, I must revisit, reread, and, if possible, reanimate it like a poem in my body before I can make meaning of its jumbled syntax. So, I keep returning, often on my own, marking the correspondences that emerge. Keeping time with my feet.

III

In the complicated syntax of the complex, the pillar is a slash. It is a line break between classical and medieval. It indicates its own uprooting—gestures at the white space of imagined worlds around it. A Vishnu temple where it might have first stood, the eternal life of its eulogized king, a missing Garuda capital.

The Iron Pillar of Mehrauli, as it is known, is an estimated 1600 years old. It has served as my sherpa in these recent years as I’ve navigated a landscape that stayed familiar even as a hostile spirit was snaking through its spine. It is 23 feet and 8 inches tall with 22 feet above ground. So much for its form. What about function?

‘Originally placed within a Vishnu temple complex at Udayagiri, the pillar for many unknown reasons, was later moved to its current location’ (INTACH, emphasis mine). Scholars speculate that the reason for its uprooting was because the Pillar served as the symbol of a former ruler’s dominion. Perhaps it was meant to serve as an epigraph to a new chapter in history. But its meaning remained obscure.

Even after the language of its original inscription has been read, the script has been identified as a later variant of the Brahmi and the verse has been dated, the identity of the king it extols divides scholarly camps. The very reason for its existence is lost. Still the pillar stands.

How is another question. One recent study found in its elemental makeup a particular balance—more phosphorus, less sulfur and magnesium. They believed it enough to explain its endurance. But the pillar has shrugged off conclusions. Even Nature, in a 2021 article concedes, ‘The exact reason for the superior corrosion resistance phenomenon remains a mystery.’

Does it mark the liminal place between seeing and knowing?

In the half-light of history and myth, of reason and faith, between doing and dreaming, I see the sharp etching on its surface, imagine the mythical capital… the bird lost in time,  the serpent it sought to stake underground.

IV

Before Delhi was any of its seven incarnations, before it was Dhillikapuri, it was an outpost. Somehow, even with evidence of inhabitation stretching back to circa 2000 BCE, Delhi had remained a slow-starter. I imagine swamp and forest, fragments of which we call the Ridge today. Then the Tomar kings arrived.

The Tomars claimed they were descendants of the Pandavas, and this backwater was the lost Indraprastha. Their imagination invokes a past that had survived only in songs and stories. Their arrival is a rupture in Delhi’s history. And they marked it by installing the Iron Pillar at Lal Kot, the first red fort of Delhi.

The pillar bears an inscription, variously read and deciphered, that in Samvat 1109 (Gregorian Calendar 1152 or 53 CE), Anangpal Tomar drove the nail (pillar) in / peopled Delhi. With the pillar as center, temples and forts were raised, razed, and re-used. In the syntax of the city, they inscribe the slash between mythic/historic.

According to a Jain legend, Anangpal was advised by a sage to drive the pillar, like a nail, into a particular spot, presumably where it now stands, because the serpent Vasuki was resting there just then. With its head impaled, a vow of the king’s legendary ancestor to exterminate all snakes, would be fulfilled. Ancestral blessings would ensure for the Tomars a long reign and a lasting legacy. Anangpal agreed. But he was perhaps more curious than compliant. He wanted to confirm if the pillar had impaled the storied serpent. When it was pulled out, the men saw that the base of the iron had turned red but Vasuki was nowhere to be seen.

The axis was off center; the ground had given way.

Delhi became susceptible to both historic and tectonic instabilities. Five dynasties followed the Tomars in quick succession. Even their reigns were beset by invading hordes like the Mongols, Timurids and Afghans. In the 16th century the Mughals arrived but they alternated capitals between Agra, Lahore, and Delhi. And the British, after moving capital from Calcutta to Delhi, lasted only three odd decades in the country. Through it all, the Iron Pillar stood, more form than function.

It was there when the Ghurids of Central Afghanistan invaded; when one of the generals, Qutbuddin Aibak, seized power, deposed the Tomars, and founded the Delhi Sultanate in the 13th century.

V

The dynasty he founded was the Slave or Mamluk. He too sought to establish his legitimacy and leave a legacy. So, using sandstone and grey quartzite, he built the Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque, repurposing the Jain and Hindu temples, and laid the foundation for the Qutub Minar. Today, the Qutub is 238 feet and five storeys tall but its formal excellence does not arrest my attention. I have walked through the complex too often, too slowly to remain a tourist.

Aibak began the Minar and completed the first storey before passing away. His son-in-law and successor, Iltutmish, added the second, third and fourth storeys. The final one was added by a ruler from another dynasty. The Minar is, therefore, not a monument to a single man, but a celebration of centuries of shared vision.

Unlike the tree in the forest which flowers and falls in silence, perhaps because no one is watching, I wonder if the Minar has survived because it has held the city in thrall like the double-reed been does the snake. Many monuments are imagined once and bequeathed to time, but the Minar has been imagined, inherited, and repaired—twice when lightning tore through its frame, twice when earthquakes shook its spine. And so its stature endures, unchallenged…I wonder at this – at how these men who shared neither lifespans nor lineages, nor languages in the case of the British, arrived at a single conclusion – that the Minar deserved to survive. Beauty isn’t argument enough or the Taj Mahal would still be inlaid with its jade and jasper, its onyx and agate. What earned the Minar this consideration? In my year of isolation this is a recurring question.

VI

On my most recent visit to the complex, I walked away from the Qutub, and towards the Alai Minar. For company, I had the odd squirrel and the jungle babblers. While the Qutub can be crowned with adjective after lyrical adjective, the Alai is riddled with one: failed.

It is a single storey structure of rubble masonry that looks like it was squashed by the plump fist of a toddler - time, the one that breaks all its toys. It too was dreamt of by a victor – Alauddin Khilji (1296 -1316 CE). Flush from his campaigns in the Deccan, he wanted to build a Minar that would outdo the Qutub. But death intervened. And his successors did not indulge his imagination.

To me, there is no better metaphor for fate’s ironies, for lost dreams and defeated ambition than this podgy monument. It is sobering to see the Qutub juxtaposed with it: like crest and trough, mastery and mortality, peak and plateau.

If it were possible, to exist without form, and only as function, the Alai Minar succeeds. It asks that terrifying question: what if there is nothing better to come? Around the complex are British follies—ziggurats, pyramids— that read like asterisks in the city’s syntax. Here, meaning splinters. Grammar falters.

VII

In one of his parables, Sri Ramakrishna tells of six blind men who stumble across an elephant. Asked to describe the animal, each offers a different account. One, having touched its leg, says it is like a pillar. Another, who finds the ear, insists it’s a husking basket. A third, brushing the tail, declares it like a rope. And so on.

Perhaps the Qutub complex has been my elephant. Perhaps it is Delhi itself. Or perhaps my elephant is one of those inescapable monoliths across which we are each bound to stumble – life, science, progress? Or the chimera we call fact? I wish that, while mapping the city for correspondences, I had staked the snake. That I had not continued to slip on the loosened skin on of an instant that has already slithered on ahead of me. That like the Tomar king, I had not turned each artefact in my mind, again and again, seeking coherence and causality. But I did. As writers must.

And I found — what Carlo Rovelli calls ‘useful approximations [to be] used by the clumsy and bungling mortal creatures we are.’ In the last three years, I have not revised the city into a known shape. Awake, I sense that Vasuki is on the move underfoot.

Everywhere, spolia are becoming stories, leaving white space around the edges.