Nasim Changhezi’s memory palace in Old Dilli

On April 13, at eight in the morning, a dozen-odd women sat around in the courtyard of Nasim Mirza Changhezi’s haveli in Pahari Imli, quietly running tamarind and date seeds through their fingers. With each seed they sent a prayer his way. Changhezi was missing from his usual reclining position on the divan in the mardana (men’s quarters), from where he surveyed everyone who entered or left his house. Earlier that morning, he had left his house in a white shroud, leaving behind the mounds of stories and memorabilia he had collected in his long and eventful life.

No one could claim to truly know Delhi’s Old City if they hadn’t met Changhezi and his son Sikandar. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew the family traced its lineage to the Mongol conqueror Changhez Khan (Genghis Khan) and, later, the Turko-Mongol conqueror Timur. We first met Changhezi sahab for an oral history project, which is now available at the Centre for Community Knowledge in Ambedkar University, Delhi.

Born in 1910, Changhezi matriculated from the Anglo-Arabic School in 1929. He went on to take part in India’s freedom struggle. Having led an eventful life, Changezi was full of stories, which soon found a wide audience. The most captivating among them is the story of his encounter with Bhagat Singh, and his failed attempt to assassinate Lord Irwin.

Although he was fond of repeating that the secret to his long life was to “eat less, sleep less and talk less”, Changhezi sahab loved talking. He would talk about his great uncle who had been sentenced to death for deserting the army to participate in the Revolt of 1857 (the sentence was later commuted to life). He proudly displayed a bullet wound that he claimed to have sustained while fighting for the British against General Rommel in South Africa in World War II.

Over several decades, he and his son had collected and preserved everything from letters to proclamations, pamphlets, and photographs dating to the late 19th and 20th centuries. They also carefully kept decorative objects, paintings, daggers, and precious ceramics. In 2015, we began cataloguing his collection for our oral history project.

‘Sri Ram Kirat Mahabharat’ in Urdu and Sanskrit (1895–96)

Having listened to his fascinating stories, excavating his archive drew us deeper into history. During our visits to Pahari Imli over several months, Sikandar would bring out bundle after bundle of old and fraying papers, telling us everything about them. The shajrah (family genealogical tree), written in Urdu and Persian, was one of the first items he showed us. Serving as the keystone to the entire collection, the shajrah helped us connect members of the extended family to the books, letters and artefacts. A closer look at the names in the tree revealed several notable historical figures: nawabs of Loharu and Jhajjar (in present-day Haryana), the late president Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, as well as Nawab Shams-ud-din Ahmed Khan, who had in 1835 hired a man named Karim Khan to assassinate William Fraser, the agent to the Governor General of India.

We also heard that when the family’s ancestors ruled Sindh, they had lost a battle against Akbar. The loss is not rued, however. Instead, credit is given to Akbar for showing clemency and inviting the family to join his court and army. It was these members of the Mughal army who moved with Shahjahan from Agra to the newly established capital of Delhi.

The largest part of Changhezi’s collection consists of the rare books that are stored in a small reading room called the Shah Waliullah Library, which is managed by Sikandar. Written in Arabic, Urdu and Persian, with an occasional volume in Hindi and English, the books cover a range of subjects including religion, logic, medicine, philosophy and poetry. This gives us a peek into the publishing culture in 19th- and 20th-century Delhi, and the readership that the family cultivated and kept alive. Even today, the library is a hub of activity, where old and young residents of Old Delhi congregate to read and share ideas.

Not everyone in the family can understand the Changhezis’ obsession with history. But both father and son revelled in their nostalgia for the city and their own braided lives. A song that the senior Changhezi frequently broke into went like this:

Humari phati topiyon ko dekh kar

Yye humnasheen tanz na kar

Humarey taaj rakhe hain ajayabkhanon mein

(Don’t mock our tattered caps, my friend

Our crowns are the glory of museums)

And this, perhaps, is why Changhezi sahab chose to make a museum of sorts of his own house, where the memories of Delhi were always on display and in performance.

Farah Yameen is an oral historian; Priyanka Seshadri studies history in Jawaharlal Nehru University