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Remembering that age, those men

A soldier, an aphrodisiac maker... R.V. SMITH continues tales of the days when Yamuna was still a river, and people fought the British

In 1950, Ghafoor Mian was 100-years-old and claimed to have witnessed the events of the Mutiny of 1857 as a child. The repercussions continued till after the death of Bahadur Shah in 1862. His friend was Mastan Shah, a wealthy aphrodisiac maker, who died at the age of 102 in 1942 and was reputed to have set fire to the stables of the British cavalry when the Gadar broke out in response to the night runner's message. A young wrestler of 17 years and four months at that time, he joined the mutinous sepoys in Delhi and accompanied them to Agra, where he eventually settled down some years letter.

I saw Baba Mastan Shah when I used to visit the old man's haveli, partly let out to my maternal grandaunt, Mrs. McGuire. At that time Shah was living with his 40-year-old fourth wife (three others, one of whom was older than him, had died).

Aphrodisiac man

Mastan Shah used to make aphrodisiacs for the rulers of princely states like Awagarh, Bhadawar, Dholpur, Alwar, Bharatpur, Rampur and Tonk, among others. He made a lot of money that way and post-independence when he died, his body was carried on a double bed because he was very hefty, weighting over 250 pounds. Up to 1941, he exercised every evening on the terrace, moving about bare-chested like a latter-day Hercules, with long, silvery locks of hair.

Ghafoor Mian lived in Mori Gate, Delhi, and had once worked for Mastan Shah, though he could not master the art of making aphrodisiacs like his mentor. Ghafoor Mian said that he and his sister, Sona, used to be hidden by their mother in bundles of grass, kept for their domestic cattle, whenever the angrez soldiers came looking for rebel sepoys in their locality.

He had heard stories of the firangis raping and sodomising respectable babus and sethanis to humiliate them and their captive men folk and made them kowtow to the dictates of the notorious prize agents. Once a group of boys from Chandni Chowk stoned the goras with such ferocity that they were forced to retreat to the Red Fort. At another time an infuriated husband attacked his wife's violator with a talwar and cut off his head.

Reduced to ruin

In another incident, a newly married woman killed her rapist with his own sword. The several monuments that were landmarks in Delhi during the Mutiny have disappeared; many others are reduced to ruins but still stand in solitary grandeur like the Khooni Darwaza, Zinat Mahal, Kashmere Gate, Salimgarh and Zinat Masjid of Daryaganj. This mosque is a venerable princess of stone, magnanimous in the "burqa" that the years have woven for it. But where is the Rajghat Gate through which the `mutineers' from Meerut gained entry into the city? Sad to say it is no longer in existence but in its place is a passage, which goats that feed across the Ring Road, use along with the goatherds and people taking a short cut to the city from Rajghat. At least this is what one saw a few years ago.

One can loiter at this entrance in the afternoon, despite the dump that has come up because of the laziness of the sweepers, who find it a most convenient place to pile up the refuse of the mohallas under their fiefdom. Could not a memorial be erected here for the benefit of the generations to come when this entrance too would perhaps no longer be there?

Beyond it is the shrine of a saint where the sepoys prayed for success. Now it's just a little-known grave covered with a green cloth. There was a time when it was washed by the waters of the Yamuna, which have receded nearly a mile to make way for the road, carrying away with them memories of the boats that used to ferry the gallant sawars fighting against an autocratic foreign establishment and the "night runners" who spread the message of the impending uprising from village to village, clutching five rotis in one hand. The men, who broke the backbone of the John Company, are all dead and gone most of them bayoneted or hung from trees, which no longer exist. The blood of the English, who fell to them, lies congealed in the soil from which new trees have sprouted like the peepul near the Delhi Gate.

The Sepoy uprising was a watershed between the Moghul era and the fast emerging modern age but whenever one passes Mori Gate by Delhi Gate or Kashmere Gate one in reminded of 1857 and people like Mastan Shah and Ghafoor Mian, who had witnessed the clash of empires with Delhi, to misquote Mathew Arnold, "Bowing low before the blast in patient deep disdain she let the legions thunder past and plunged in through again".

Just like the East, which countered the West with its passive resistance - so well demonstrated by Mahatma Gandhi.

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