This was first presented as a paper in a seminar on “The River” organised by the Max Muller Bhawan on 11 and 12 December 2010. Photo credits: Gigi Mon Scaria, Himanshu Joshi and Sohail Hashmi.
The agencies that have wrought this havoc continue to initiate decisions that will permanently erase all signs of the river that has sustained the city that you and I call Hamari Dilli. Before coming to my understanding of what needs to be done to save the Jamna, instead of what is being done to destroy it. I would like to draw your attention to certain geographical features of the land around Delhi, in order to better understand the factors that contributed to the location of the several Delhi’s and their relationship to the river.
The river Jamna roughly divides the city in two unequal halves, with two thirds of the city to the west of the river and 1/3rd to its east. To the southwest and the northwest of the river the land rises gradually till it meets the outcrops of the Arravalis while the plains extend without any major prominences across a vast region to the east. It was perhaps the combination of a river and hilly prominences not too far away that contributed to the popularity of the area as an ideal location for building capital cities in the Delhi plains.
The hilly prominences of the Arravalis to the South west of the city were to become the location of two of the first four Delhi’s -the first was Lal Kot or Qila Rai Pithora and the third was Tughlaqabad. Al’a-ud-Din Khilji’s Siri, and Mohammad Bin Tughlaq’s Jahanpanah, respectively the 2nd and the 4th Delhi’s were located in the plains, relatively closer to the Arravalis than they were to the river, both incidentally were surrounded by protective walls.
Now these 4 cities did not have anything much to do with the river. They certainly did not depend on it to meet their requirements of water. The First urban settlement in Mehrauli relied on wells, step-wells, manmade water bodies like the Hauz-e-Shamsi- built by Sultan Altamash and a few streams like the Naulakha Nala to meet its water requirements.
The second, that is Siri met most of its water needs from the Hauz-e-Khas, commissioned by Ala-ud-Din Khilji and filled by trapping streams, both perennial and rain fed. These streams probably included the two that now run through the IIT campus.
The third city that is Tughlaqabad was the closest to the Jamna, in fact, the Naulakha Nala, carrying the monsoonal overflow of the Hauz-e-Shamsi had created a huge lake, in a depression, between two hills that stood facing each other. Ghyas-ud-Din Tughlaq built the Tughlaqabad fort on the Arravalis using the lake as a moat for the south facing wall of the fort; he chose an island in the middle of the lake as the site for his mausoleum. His son and heir apparent, Mohammad Bin Tughlaq built his fort of Adilabad on the opposite hill, to the south of the lake. A path above the barrage connected the two forts, sluice gates built into the barrage regulated the overflow of the lake into the Jamna and the waters were used for irrigation by the peasants living to the east of the two forts and the lake.
Despite so much water neither the fort nor the town of Tughlaqabad appear to have used the water of the lake for their daily use, for they had built many reservoirs, kunds and baolis inside the fortified city and palace.
Due to large scale construction in the Bijay Mandal area it is difficult to hazard a guess about how the fourth city, Jahanpanah, met its water needs. The Jamna, due primarily to its distance from this area, could not have been a source and therefore, wells, manmade or natural reservoirs, perennial and non-perennial tributaries of the Jamna including the Chiragh Dehli Nala, across which Mohammad bin Tughlaq had thrown a barrage and several others that criss- crossed the plains, could have been the sources that met the needs of the population that resided within the incomplete walls of Jahanpanah.
From the above it is clear that the Jamna was not the life line for at least 4 of the seven Delhis that came to exist in this region between the early decades of the 13th century (Iltutmish reign 1211-1236) and the middle of the 14th century (Mohammad bin Tughlaq reign1324-1351) and that these cities relied mainly on the large number of wells, step wells, natural and manmade lakes and reservoirs and to a limited extent on the streams that fed the Jamuna. The peasants living outside the fortified cities would perhaps have made more use of these streams.
Let us quickly review the other three Delhis, all built on the bank of the Jamna, to see if proximity to the river had in any major way altered their patterns of water consumption. The fact that none of the three cities Firozabad or Kotla Firozeshah (1350s-1388), Quila-e-Kuhna (1533-1556) and Shahjahanabad(1642-1857) were open to the river gives us some idea of their relationship with the river.
All of them were fortress cities, enclosed within a retaining wall and like their predecessors, had their own sources of water that included wells, step wells water tanks etc to meet the daily needs of the residents.
The Kotla of Firozeshah has a huge Baoli and the baoli has so much water even today that it is used to irrigate all the lush green lawns and flower beds of the fort, there could have been other wells, step wells and reservoirs that supplemented this baoli.
The Qila-e-Kuhna or Puraana Qila was located atop a hillock and taking water from the river, that flowed next to the eastern wall, would not have been feasible, not at least to meet all the requirements of the fort despite a small gate on the eastern wall that provided access to the river. The Purana Quila Baoli and the large well located next to the Hamam, both of which have water even now, could very well have been the major sources of water for the fort.
