On a Diwali night in the reign of Muhammad Shah, who ruled from 1719 to 1748, sixteen ropes creaked at the Red Fort and a lamp began to rise. The pole under it stood forty yards tall. Several mounds of cottonseed oil fed the flame, and the glow, men later said, reached Chandni Chowk.
Fireworks went up beneath the walls under the eye of Mir Atish, the master of fireworks. Some Mughal ladies, it is said, climbed the Qutub Minar to watch.
The pole had a soldier's past. In the Ain-i-Akbari, Abul Fazl describes one like it: upwards of forty yards high, steadied by sixteen ropes, with a large lantern on top that he calls the Akas-diya, the sky lamp. It stood in front of the darbar so that soldiers arriving from afar could find the imperial camp. Before it stood, he writes, the men had struggled to find the road. It began as a beacon.
The chapter is called "On Illuminations" and is closer to theology than administration. Every flame, Abul Fazl writes, descends from the sun, and the sun's fire is "the torch of God's sovereignty". Each year, as the sun entered Aries, a white stone was held to its rays until a scrap of cotton caught fire, and that celestial flame went into a vessel called the Ayangir, to serve the household's lamps and kitchens until the next renewal.
The dynasty told a matching story about its blood. Alan Qo'a, an ancestress of Chinggis Khan, was said to have conceived when a ray of light entered her tent, and Abul Fazl found room for her in the Akbarnama.
At every sunset, the Ain records, twelve white candles were set on stands of gold and silver before Akbar, and a singer holding a candle sang praise of God. Badauni, Akbar's sharpest critic, records that from 1579 the whole court had to rise whenever the evening lamps were lit. From the later years of his reign, his painters almost never showed an emperor without a golden halo. Light was how this court explained why it ruled.
So when the Mughals saw Diwali and its rows of lamps, they needed little persuading. The Ain mentions the festival and its lights, and Akbar took part in its customs rather than merely allowing them. His Rajput marriages had already brought Hindu households into the palace.
Historians still argue over how much of this was devotion and how much calculation, and the chronicles, written by the court for the court, make poor referees.
Jahangir's mother and Shah Jahan's were both Rajput princesses, so Diwali reached these emperors through family as well as policy. Jahangir's memoirs are franker than the chronicles. He calls Diwali a festival of the Vaishya caste, a time for meeting friends, and mentions the gambling that accompanies it. There is no theology in that, only a man noting how his subjects spend a night.
Shah Jahan gave it a capital. When he moved from Agra and built Shahjahanabad, he extended his patronage to the Hindu festivals observed by his army and his people, and the Rang Mahal inside the Red Fort became the royal centre of Jashn-e-Chiraghan, the Persian name for the festival of lamps.
RV Smith, the Delhi chronicler, credits him with bringing the sky lamp into the fort's Diwali, turning a soldier's beacon into a festival spectacle. Firecrackers, under the Mir Atish, were set off near the walls on Diwali and Shab-e-Barat alike. Maheshwar Dayal's history of the walled city also records a Dussehra ground on the Yamuna bank for Hindu soldiers, and twenty days after Dussehra the lamps went up.
None of this was charity. Hindu soldiers and Rajput allies fought the empire's wars, and an emperor who lit their lamps bought goodwill no tax collector could. The record tells us what emperors did on Diwali and almost nothing about what a clerk's family in Chandni Chowk did with its own oil.
Under Aurangzeb, the record splits. Some writers say he forbade Holi and Diwali displays at court; others note that he continued accepting Diwali gifts from Rajput commanders such as Jai Singh of Jaipur and Jaswant Singh of Jodhpur. A festival can leave the palace calendar and remain in the city. He reigned for almost half a century, and Smith writes that the sky lamp blazed again only under Muhammad Shah, after years of neglect.
Muhammad Shah wrote verse under the pen name Rangeela and is remembered more for the name than the poems. William Dalrymple notes that he was no great success as an emperor, though his reign was good for the arts. The money for the festival came from duwazdihi, voluntary contributions from his nobles, so the nobles, not just the treasury, paid for the night.
Oil, rope, timber and a crew to haul it all turned the lamp into a source of employment as well as a spectacle. A painting shows the emperor celebrating outside the palace with ladies of the court, and Rana Safvi describes a weighing ceremony, the emperor weighed against gold and silver that was then distributed to the poor. Smith counts it among the last times the sky lamp was lit.
In 1739, Nadir Shah's army sacked Delhi and carried off the Peacock Throne, and the fort's grand Diwalis passed into memory. Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last emperor, is credited with founding the city's first Ramlila committee, which still meets, but he inherited an empire that barely extended beyond his own walls.
After 1857, the British tried him, exiled him to Rangoon, where he died in 1862, and turned the fort into a garrison. A claim to heavenly light is hard to sustain in Rangoon.
Nobody can repeat the ladies' climb now, since the Qutub Minar's stairs were closed to visitors in 1981. In the lanes near Chandni Chowk, the lamps still come out in rows each autumn, some of clay and many electric, and the Persian name for the night has slipped away from most of the people lighting them.
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Mahmud Newaz Joy is a freelance feature writer based in Bangladesh.