Know your Delhi:Turkman gate

Danish Shafi

It’s a feeble attempt to resurrect an era. Though the Archaeological Survey of India has taken upon itself to revamp the Turkman Gate, there’s little it can do to restore its imposing dignity. For when Mughal emperor Shah Jahan built it in the late 1650s, it was one of the 14 gates holding together the wall that encircled his modernity, ensconced as it is between the drab Haj Manzil and the Delhi Stock Exchange on the Asaf Ali Road.

“The gate takes its name from the dargah of Shah Turkman, a peer who came to Delhi from Turkmenistan in the early 13th century and settle in the wilderness (bayabaan in Urdu) that the area was back then,” reveals Sajjad-e-Nashin Syed Azam Ali Nizaami, caretaker of the Shah Turkman Bayabaani dargah, one of the oldest in old Delhi.

Located in a corner behind the Turkman Gate, it is an unlikely refuge, but one that draws its hordes of faithful.

“Since the Hazrat settled in bayabaan, he was called Bayabaani and the area was known by this name much before the Mughals,” adds Nizaami. But Shah Jahan decided to name the gate after the peer who died in 1240 AD.

“It housed the Delhi Civil Defence’s office which was vacated two years ago. They don’t realise the importance of the historical monument and mar its beauty,” says Mohammed Luqmaan, a resident of the area, pointing towards the electric pole with its tangle of wires and the water tank perched on rusted legs behind the gate.

It may not be a thoroughfare anymore and the scaffolds (for renovation) around the gate’s two pillars don’t quite add to its beauty, but on polling days it has its uses: it shelters the election officials and voting machines. One of the five remaining gates in the city, the Turkman Gate was built using boulders that are not intimidating any longer. As Luqmaan points to the peeling plaster, a sign of impending ruin, he says, “It was said Dilli would be destroyed nine times. It has happened eight times; the ninth is awaited.”