Word: delhi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
India's festering sun beat down impartially on New and Old Delhi-on the precisely geometric, grandly drab preserves of the British Raj, on the noisy, squalid, sprawling native town. A sweat-soaked British wallah might change his shirt four times before settling down to an evening burra peg of bad Australian whiskey in the garden of the Cecil Hotel. Even the calloused, naked feet of shirtless Indians burned as they padded along the teeming Chandni Chauk. In the brassy glare, the flowering trees near the Viceroy's residence seemed to bear sparks rather than blossoms. The rind...
...Delhi in the spring heat of 1946 was not relaxed; it was taut with waiting, gravid with conflict and suspense. Two Socialist lawyers and a former Baptist lay preacher from Britain had sat for 25 days in the southeast wing of the viceregal palace, preparing to liquidate the richest portion of empire that history had ever seen-to end the British Raj, the grand and guilty edifice built and maintained by William Hawkins and Robert Clive, Warren Hastings and the Marquess Wellesley, the brawling editor James Silk Buckingham and the canny merchant Lord Inchcape, and by the great Viceroys, austere...
...with an Angora Cap. While the Cabinet Mission still talked with India's leaders, a meeting was held in the courtyard of Anglo-Arabic College across Delhi from the Viceroy's palace. Green and white banners flaunted unacademic slogans: "Pakistan or die," "We are determined to fight." The speeches were equally inflammatory. Said Abdul Qaiyum Khan from the North-West Frontier Province: "I hope the Moslem nation will strike swiftly before [a Hindu] government can be set up in this country. . . . The Moslems will have no alternative but to take out their swords." Said Sirdar Shaukat Hyat Khan...
...afternoon of the third day, the elevator brought Mohandas K. Gandhi. He had come to New Delhi by special train, rode in a Packard over a driveway made especially for him to a colony of bhangis (sweepers), who belonged to the underprivileged but politically potent caste of Untouchables. When the living idol of some 200 million Indians emerged from his meeting with the British ministers, he smiled a Gandhi smile...
...temperature in New Delhi rose to 107°. The Cabinet Commission prepared for a brief Easter holiday in cool Kashmir. Then they would return to sweltering Delhi and its sizzling political issues...