India breaks: Delighted by Delhi, amazed by Agra on a tour in Grandad's footsteps
This sunny morning in New Delhi, I'm watching the changing of the President's Guard. Red-coated, turbaned lancers trot by eight abreast on glossy chestnut horses. Infantry in yellow and scarlet present arms with a flutter of white gloves. Bellowed commands from moustachioed sergeant-majors blend with the brassy lilt of a pitch-perfect military band.
India again: This visit was Philip Norman's first journey to the sub-continent since the Seventies
It all could be happening a century ago, at the zenith of the British Raj. And, indeed, it's exactly 100 years since my photojournalist grandfather, Frank Augustus Bassill, was here. He was a cameraman for the Pathe newsreel, one of a breed of globetrotting filmmakers who once commanded a vast daily audience but now are almost forgotten.
In that pre-television age, Britain's only source of filmed news was the cinema, where a half-hour 'reel' mixing domestic and foreign reports and sport was shown. There were four newsreel companies in cut-throat competition that makes today's tabloid wars look tame. Pathe, with its lustily crowing cockerel emblem, was the most famous and Grandad was its ace cameraman. He had an extraordinary career spanning 40 years and two wars.
More...
But his most memorable assignment was covering the 1911 Delhi Durbar, when the newly crowned George V came to meet India's maharajas and receive vows of undying loyalty as 'King Emperor'.
Largely thanks to the stories Grandad told, I too became a globetrotting journalist before writing books. That era took me to India just once, albeit unforgettably. In the Seventies, I went to interview Prime Minister Indira Gandhi an Iron Lady before Margaret Thatcher who, not long afterwards, was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. Now I'm back in Delhi in the Durbar's centenary, following in my grandfather's footsteps as well as retracing my own.
Gentleman of the press: Philip's grandfather Frank Augustus Bassill visited India in 1911
In 1911, Grandad travelled to India by sea, a voyage that took six weeks. I do it in seven hours with India's Jet Airways, fortunate to be plied with hot towels and served an Indian vegetarian dinner that is the best in-flight meal I've ever had.
Delhi now boasts an enormous ultra-modern airport, named after Mrs Gandhi. But the bureaucracy we British bequeathed to India has been ramped up even further by Al Qaeda, the threat from Pakistan and, above all, the terrorist attack in Mumbai three years ago.
When I came to interview Mrs Gandhi, I didn't need a visa (any more than did Grandad.) This time, I've been through a tortuous admission procedure requiring a form to be completed online, then personally submitted to the Indian High Commission with two mugshots which, perversely, must be 2in square rather than normal passport-size. Most crucially, I've been warned not to give my occupation as 'journalist', nor let slip to Indian immigration officials that I have anything to do with writing. The professio! n that's always opened doors for me now makes me feel almost like an Untouchable.
In the 30 years since I was last here, India has transformed itself into the world's 11th largest economy, acquired a booming stock market, embraced the internet and become the call-centre centre of the universe. And thanks to Slumdog Millionaire, even the country's appalling poverty has taken on a kind of soft-focus glamour.
Yet driving through central Delhi, I see much that I recognise and some things that even Grandad would. There is the same madly honking but unaggressive traffic, flashy new Toyotas jostling with horse-drawn carts, wandering sacred cows, rickshaws and old Ambassador saloons. There are the same building sites where delicate women in saris work alongside their husbands, and the scaffolding is made of bamboo. The same green monkeys dangle from shabby trees or peer through railings with earnest faces. The same countless lives are lived on the street, under grey canvas or driftwood leantos the luckier ones with a plastic sheet to keep out the rain.
Trunk call: Frank Bassill was in Delhi to cover the accession of George V
And everywhere there's a blithe disregard for 'health and safety'. At a red light, our car draws alongside a motorbike ridden by a man in an (unfastened) crash helmet. Behind him, his helmetless wife rides sidesaddle holding a tiny baby, and three small boys are somehow squashed in between them.
On my study wall at home are two sepia photographs of Grandad on assignment for Pathe in India. One shows him perched on an elephant, his heavy wood-and-brass camera and tripod beside him. The other is of the Taj Mahal looming over Grandad's tiny, pith-helmeted figure as he prepares to film it.
The 1911 Delhi Durbar was more than just a PR exercise by George V and his consort Queen Mary. It also marked the transference of India's capital to Delh! i from C alcutta. A year later, the British began building an administrative centre to be known as New Delhi, designed by the architect Edwin Lutyens. Work did not end until 1931, when the Raj's days were already numbered.
'Lutyens' New Delhi' remains the city's anomalous hub, as spacious, silent and majestic as Old Delhi is crowded and chaotic. Today, those great sandstone edifices contain the offices of the President, Prime Minister and key government departments. But the English names remain, such as King's Way, which leads to the India Arch, commemorating 90,000 Indian troops who gave their lives for the Empire.
Watching redcoated lancers parade, I realise that nearby is the portico to the Prime Minister's office, where I arrived to interview Mrs Gandhi. I recall how afterwards I was given a lift with her Sikh bodyguards in a cosy-looking Ambassador cosy except for the tommy-guns stashed under its back seat. I could well have been chatting with her future assassins.
Pomp and majesty: There is still a hint of the Raj about the changing of the President's Guard in Delhi
I don't know where Grandad stayed in Delhi, though I'm sure he wouldn't have roughed it. Pathe gave him expenses 'golden guineas in a money-belt' in advance.
My hotel is the five-star Kempinski Leela Palace in the posh suburb of Chanakyapuri. Like every top Indian hotel since the Mumbai massacre, it subjects all arrivals to airport-style security checks. Nonetheless, dedication to perfection shows in everything at the Leela, from the foyer's marble magnificence, to the smiling namaste (peace) sign from every staff member you encounter, to the gourmet cookies arranged each day under a little glass dome in your room.
When I was last in Delhi, I never visited an Indian restaurant. If someone invited me to lunch, they would telephone some mysterious central kitc! hen and within minutes a multi-course meal would arrive in white cardboard boxes. The Leela Palace has a superlative Indian restaurant called Jamavar; there's also the Qube brasserie, serving Indian, Chinese, American, French, Italian and even Mexican dishes. Rather disloyally, I order an excellent but fiery penne arrabiata.
Later, I'm in the heart of Old Delhi, looking up at the rose-coloured Lal Qila, the Red Fort, from which George V greeted thousands of ordinary Indians after the Durbar. I feel a tap on my leg. It's a boy of about three, naked below the waist, pinching his fingers against his lips in the gesture that says, 'I'm hungry.' I give him a dollar bill and he toddles off, holding it aloft as though trying to see the watermark. Such images etch themselves on your conscience for ever.
On my last day, I follow my grandfather's footsteps to Agra and the Taj Mahal. The Leela Palace supplies a driver for the four-hour trip. The road is officially a motorway, though equally open to pedestrians, camels and rickshaw scooters. Passing through one tumultuous village, we meet a cart whose load of timber has made its small white pony collapse between the shafts. About 30 passers-by immediately rally to lift it to its feet again.
At another junction, we're surrounded by a herd of cattle, as sacred to Hindus as the solitary wandering kind. The driver jumps out and tries to fend the beasts off his BMW while showing them no disrespect.
So here I am at last, looking at the real Taj Mahal rather than the sepia one. I expected it to be astoundingly beautiful but not to look so feathery-light, as if the faintest breeze could lift its pearl onion dome and four slim minarets and whirl them away.
Timeless: The Taj Mahal is one of the world's most beautiful buildings
When Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan built this memorial to his third wife, Mumtaz, he little dreamt ho! w she wo uld be upstaged by a golden-haired princess in the Nineties. Today, tourists jostle to be photographed on the plain marble seat now known as Di's Bench.
I, however, am thinking of Frank Augustus Bassill, here 100 years ago with his pith helmet and newsreel camera and how proud I am to be descended from him.
Travel Facts
The Leela Palace offers double rooms from 199 per night. For bookings and information visit www.theleela.com.
Jet Airways (0808 101 1199, www.jetairways.com) has Heathrow-Delhi return fares from 600pp.
For further information on India see www.incredibleindia.org.
Indian tourist visas can be fast-tracked by Benmar Passport and Visa Services, 43 Maiden Lane, London WC2E 7LL, for 44 for a visa and a handling charge of 25 plus VAT (020 7379 5536).
Comments