T.R. Schoonover's Africa-India Travelogue
01 March 1952
New Delhi, India
T.R.S…
Awoke on Saturday, March 1, in New Delhi, capital city of the Indian republic, and drove at once
to the Imperial Hotel where breakfast was served in a ballroom on the mezzanine floor, a room
50 x 100 feet with no posts or pillars. Windows 30 feet tall from floor to ceiling, are swung
open, and sparrows fly in and about picking at food on buffet and gathering crumbs on carpeted floor.
In lower hotel corridor saw a young Indian rajah dressed informally in a yellow shirt and blue jeans - his wife in a pale blue blouse with matching slacks, typical of young Americans. He is said to be Oxford educated and will some day inherit vast lands, a stable of elephants and a bucket of jewels from his monarch father.
Here we met and had a pleasant chat with Captain Fortner, U.S. Navy attaché, a good friend of ADM. Tom Sprague and knows our famous Taylor boys, Ted and Tommy, now Navy commanders. Tommy formerly was Captain Fortner's aide.
Toured Delhi with a Parsee lady guide and a Sikh driver, both of whom spoke tolerable English. Elaborate government buildings with ornamental brick wall fences, sweeping crescent shaped in grand circus fashion around the paved hubs, lend dignity and character to the great buildings. Clean, wide boulevards divided by grass plots and flower beds extend spoke-like in all directions.
The old section of the city is Banaras and Agra all over again - a confusion of little shops, bazaars and seething humanity, but New Delhi is as modern as Rockefeller Centre and just as spectacular in an oriental way. For miles out, Delhi is surrounded by medieval ruins of temples, tombs and towers.
The inhabitants seem to revel in the glorified antiquity of their country and to idle their time away in the decay that surrounds them. Dozens of tombs, all with the typical turnip-shaped domes, dot the countryside. Sheep and goats lie in the shade of the broken arches, and pigeons roost on the frescoed cornices.
These tombs contain the mortal remains of great leaders of the Mohammedan hordes and Persian armies that long ago swooped down from the north. Akbar and his progeny was the great conqueror of this dynasty, and their mammoth forts, tombs and palaces surely must have been gems of grandeur in their heyday.
One lofty tower south of Delhi, known as Qutub Minar, is of superb masonry that on close inspection shows red granite joints that are practically hairline in precision and with hand-chiselled Mohammedan inscriptions so sharp that they look as tho they might have been completed just last week.
