Goats Everywhere!

Post for 11/21/09—Delhi: Goats Everywhere!

1. The first picture shows Denise with our friends Reade and David Dornan, of East Lansing, in the courtyard at Yatri Guest House in Delhi, the morning of 11/21. They had flown in from Vietnam where they are teaching for the academic year, and we flew in from Paris. David is retired from the Michigan Department of Community Health, and Reade is almost retired as a Professor in the English Department at Michigan State University.

2. The next picture is the India we thought we’d see—tall buildings and modern conveniences at Connaught Circle. The Circle was built by the British in the 1930s as an upscale shopping center, although the stores and restaurants are a bit bedraggled. We found a decent restaurant there for dinner after our wild afternoon.

3. Here’s our wild afternoon—the market happening in the half mile or so behind the Jami Masjid, the largest mosque in India. We had taken the subway from our guesthouse and walked to the Red Fort, which I’ll describe in Picture #5. Finding the lines for admission too long, we decided to start walking elsewhere. Soon we were caught in a crush of people and goats. Most of the goats were decorated with ribbons, and I’ve never been in such a crush of people, selling and buying and yelling. We walked from the banner barely visible at the far end of the picture to the mosque steps, from which I was able to take the picture. The occasion was the Eid al-Adhha, the feast of sacrifice, where Muslims remember Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac—until a suitable animal wandered by. Apparently the goats would be sacrificed within the 3 days of the feast. (The story is in the Jewish and Christian scriptures—Genesis—and in American Blues sung by Bob Dylan and Johnny Winter: God said “Abraham, kill me a son;” Abe said, “Where you want this killin’ done?” God said, “Out on Highway 61.”)

4. This is the mosque itself—though when I compared my photo with those in the guidebook, I realized we had walked up toward the back of the mosque. It was built in the 1650s by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, who also built the Taj Mahal. The mosque holds 20,000 worshipers.

5. For two more centuries the Mughals ruled much of India from Delhi’s Red Fort, also built by Emperor Jahan. This was also where the British crushed a revolt against their rule in 1857 and put a formal end to Indian sovereignty. For 90 years the British monarch claimed the title of Emperor of India, until the Indian people, led by Gandhi, took their nation back. One guidebook says—I haven’t fact-checked it—that the Red Fort is the first place the new flag of independent India was raised at midnight, August 15, 1947.
Final note: Reade has been reading, and highly recommends, Salman Rushdie’s novel, Midnight’s Children, about Indian families with children born at midnight August 15, 1947.