LOS ANGELES: Shortly before the fall of the vast, wealthy Mughal reign — the one that managed to generate one-fifth of the world’s wealth in 1600 and gave us the anglicised word “mogul” — a leader is said to have shrugged off an impending foreign invasion by saying, “Dilli door ast,” or “Delhi is far away.”
It’s quite an unusual way of characterising the seat of one’s empire, especially when compared to the well-known, proud proverb, “All roads lead to Rome.” But India — the country and, more aptly, the idea of the country — has always seemed distant, not just to orientalising outsiders but to Indians themselves. Sixty years after it declared independence from the British, though, that may be changing, for better and worse.
“Dilli door ast”, taken literally, simply meant that it took a while for would-be conquerors to make the trek to the city, in India’s central northern region, far from borders that bulged with mountains. But the shah, and every ruler or leader of India since, may not have appreciated its eventual metaphorical implication — that “government” of such a place was impossible; that no system could possibly exert authority over such a vast land and populace, where dialects and religious and social customs were too numerous and entangled to count accurately.
British rule, as both imperial apologists and anti-colonialists must agree, helped make Delhi less distant, establishing transportation infrastructure, a rapacious tax system and a broad census.
Today, it’s undeniable that Delhi has consolidated its power. Massive infrastructure, education and affirmative-action-style programmes have brought the stamp of central government (if not actual progress) to rural villages.
And Delhi has never been less far from the US. The most recent and controversial outgrowth of the new relationship is a bilateral nuclear deal that, critics say, rewards India for refusing to sign nonproliferation agreements. And, also recent and controversial, is the brain-drain-plugging phenomenon of outsourcing. “Dilli door ast” may one day be replaced by a paraphrase of the above proverb, if it hasn’t been already: All phone calls lead to India.—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service
