Delhi Darshan

by Giles Tillotson

  The Qutb Minar and Mehrauli

  The Qutb Minar and the mosque to which it is attached, the Quwwatu’l-Islam, are among the oldest stone structures built by a settled Muslim power in India, having been begun in the closing years of the twelfth century. Their early date, as much as their prominence and beauty—not to mention their status as a UNESCO World Heritage site—lend them an iconic status in Delhi’s architectural landscape (pp. 8–18 and, for later additions, pp. 26–29).

  With so many phases of building, it is hard to make sense of the complex until you have seen it all. So here is one suggested route through the maze. Follow the curving entrance path to the left and then turn right to head first for the central courtyard of the mosque. After exploring that (and the iron pillar) leave the courtyard through the north-west corner of the ruined prayer hall to visit the tomb of Iltutmish. From there, take the path that goes back behind the mosque to the madrasa, and from there into the southern extension of the mosque built by Iltutmish. At the far end of that stands the Qutb Minar and behind it the Alai Darwaza. Exit through the latter so you can see its fine southern façade. Then (facing the gate) turn right and take the flight of steps up into the garden, where you will find Robert Smith’s folly and Gordon Sanderson’s sundial.

  Sanderson was a brilliant young archaeologist who, after a short stint studying the Islamic architecture of Cairo, joined the Archaeological Survey of India. In 1912, he was deputed to assess the viability of entrusting the design of New Delhi to Indian rather than British architects; his report suggesting that it could was published but also trashed by the government (see p. 105). At the same time, he studied the historic monuments of Delhi to consider the likely impact of the construction of the new city on them. With the outbreak of World War I, he sailed to England to sign up. On the voyage he fell in love. On disembarking he immediately married, conceived a child, was despatched to the front and within weeks was killed. Much of his work came to light only recently when his grandson (who of course never knew him) inherited his papers from his mother (Sanderson’s child), recognized their significance and made them available. At the time of his death, Sanderson’s colleagues in the ASI erected the sundial in his memory. It is a short walk from the sundial back to the exit.

  The village of Mehrauli, to the south-west of the Qutb complex, is dense and congested. The tomb of Adham Khan (p. 65) stands at the north end of the village and is most easily reached by the road that runs behind the Qutb complex. From this point too one can climb up onto the top of a surviving section of the old wall of the Lal Kot, the fort built by the Rajputs. Up there, one is above the level of the tree canopy and the modern urban context suddenly vanishes. It is like looking at the plains of Delhi in a print by the Daniells.

  The Hauz-i-Shamsi, the tank built by Iltutmish in 1230, lies at the southern end of the village and is best approached from a turning off the Mehrauli–Gurgaon Road. The dargah of Qutb Sahib, the Sufi saint, is towards the centre and can only be reached on foot (p. 23). It is fascinating as an active shrine, but women are not permitted to enter the enclosure where the saint lies buried.

  Between the village and the bypass (to the east) is a large area, once a suburb of the oldest city, now mostly fenced in and defined as the ‘Mehrauli Archaeological Park’. Somewhat reminiscent of the Lodi Gardens (though less well-tended), this area is a mixture of gardens, orchards, nurseries and woodland, dotted with historic monuments, including the Jamali-Kamali mosque and tomb and the tomb of Quli Khan (pp. 54–55, 66).

  A few hundred yards to the west of the Jamali-Kamali mosque is the Rajon-ki-Bain, a multi-tiered stepwell. At one end a flight of steps leads down into the water, while on the three other sides galleries and apartments line the retaining walls. A small mosque on a connecting platform contains an inscription that states it was built in 1506, in the reign of Sikander Lodi. But the well might be older. As a form of underground architecture, stepwells are often dramatic but this one has an especially arresting composition. It was probably made for the benefit of the general public, a source of supply of water for domestic use; with apartments added as cool places to rest during the hottest months.

  On the far side of the bypass, near the junction with the Badarpur Road, a small square tomb, said to be that of one ‘Azim Khan’ (about whom nothing is known) crowns a rocky eminence. In form it is like many other late Lodi or early Mughal tombs, but its spectacular location enhances its impact wonderfully. The next hillock to the south is used in a similar way to a very different purpose. Now called Ahimsa Sthal or ‘seat of non-violence’, it is surmounted by a huge modern statue of Mahavir, the last of the twenty-four Jain Thirthankaras, often considered the founder of the religion, carved in polished granite from Karnataka. The saint directs his stony gaze northwards towards the busy city, but with the archaeological park to his left and a patch of green-belt to his right, his hilltop throne is surrounded by a carpet of greenery, and the sides of the hill are clad with a well-kept garden.

  Heading south towards Gurgaon, the bypass ascends a ridge, beyond which a branch road leads to the former village of Chhatarpur, now dominated by a vast modern temple complex. The Chhatarpur temple, spread over sixty acres, is one of the largest in India and is always thronged with multitudes of devotees. The main shrine is dedicated to the goddess Katyayani, an avatar of Durga, and includes—beside the normal image chamber—a fully furnished sitting room and a bedroom for her personal use. The temple was founded in 1974 by Baba Sant Nagpalji (d. 1988) whose samadhi or cremation site lies within the complex. There are more than twenty other temples besides, all built of stone and mostly in a conservative south Indian style, thus showing the tradition to be alive (if a touch ossified) and as exuberant as ever.

  Rajpath and Janpath

  One way to catch a glimpse of Rashtrapati Bhavan—the former Viceroy’s House (pp. 105–109)—is to drive up the slope of Raisina hill between the Secretariats, hop out while the driver lingers under the watchful gaze of the police (no parking is permitted) and peer between the bars of the handsome iron gates. If you cannot see much detail from this distance, you can at least get a sense of the palace’s profile and its relation to the other buildings, including the curious way in which the slope blocks the view as you approach, so that it seems to disappear, only to pop up again when you reach the summit. Edwin Lutyens, who did not foresee this effect—the result of Herbert Baker’s insistence that the Secretariats should stand on the crest, not at the foot, of the hill—called it his Bakerloo. He felt it marred the design. He didn’t want mystery, he wanted dominance. The critic Robert Byron described the palace as ‘a slap on the face of democracy’. He meant it as a compliment.

  Now the official residence of the President of the Indian Republic, the palace is open to the public on application. Visitors are given a short tour. This is well worth doing to see the details of the stone carving, and the grand apartments such as the Durbar Hall and the Ballroom. The main staircase is contained in an open courtyard, topped by a coving that makes the sky look like a brilliant blue ceiling; it is quite the cleverest neoclassical staircase since the vestibule of the Laurentian Library. Another thing that is alone worth seeing is the fine Qajjar-period painting of Fath Ali Shah out hunting, which is stuck on the ceiling of the former State Ballroom (now called the Ashoka Hall). This was not a part of Lutyens’s plan; he had intended restrained decorations that would not detract from the architecture. But Lady Willingdon had other ideas. In 1932, she found the painting in the India Office (it seems to have been presented to the Prince Regent in 1814) and had it shipped out to India, where she engaged Tomasso Colonnello and a team of Indian assistants to transform the Ballroom into a Persian-themed extravaganza, with Fath Ali Shah riding overhead.

  One may approach Baker’s Secretariat buildings—North and South Blocks (pp. 106–109)—closely enough to admire the detailing, but not enter them, since they are still occupied by the principal ministries. The former Council House, now the Parliament building—
down the slope and away to the left—is even more strictly guarded, with good reason, as it has been the target of a (foiled) terrorist attack in recent times.

  India Gate (p. 108) sits at the centre of an octagon defined by a road that was originally called Princes Place, because the adjoining plots were assigned to various leading maharajas to enable them to build palaces in the new capital. The clustering of leading maharajas here was meant to signal their participation in the empire. Since Independence their houses have all been acquired by the state and assigned new functions. The most elegant, Hyderabad House, designed by Lutyens, is now reserved for entertaining visiting heads of state (though spurned by one US President, allegedly because he was told that both the security and the cheeseboard were better at the Maurya Sheraton). Baroda House is now the headquarters of the northern railways board; Patiala House is the Delhi district court; while Bikaner House is the office of the Rajasthan tourism board and a venue for cultural events.

  At the south-east corner is Jaipur House, designed by Geoffrey and Francis Blomfield (p. 114). This elegant mansion, and the extension built in 2009 by A.R. Ramanathan and Snehanshu Mukherjee, together house the National Gallery of Modern Art, the nation’s largest and finest collection of painting and sculpture dating from the nineteenth century and later. Among the leading modern Indian artists whose works are particularly well represented here are Abanindranath Tagore, Amrita Sher-Gil, Jamini Roy and Ramkinker Baij.

  Earlier phases of Indian art are exhibited at the National Museum, located at the intersection of Rajpath with Janpath, the north-south perpendicular road, formerly called Queensway, which bisects Rajpath at its midpoint. The purpose-built structure (inaugurated in 1960) is not handsome and is not well maintained, and a visit is not the aesthetic delight that it ought to be. The vast and magnificent collection of stone sculpture—comprising mostly idols and temple fragments—is unimaginatively displayed, with pieces glued on to pedestals with minimal labelling. This may be acceptable to specialists who already know what they are seeing, but it is unhelpful to anyone trying to get acquainted with India’s most characteristic genre of art. The miniature paintings (Mughal, Rajasthani and Pahari) fare a little better, but only a small proportion of the collection is included. The other galleries—archaeology, anthropology, numismatics—are dispiriting, and there is far too little space in the textile gallery. The gift shop has improved after a makeover, but it still lacks books. There are too few publications on the museum’s holdings. That’s partly because there are too few staff to write them: half the curators’ posts have been vacant for decades. Government institutions don’t have to be like this.

  Heading north up Janpath, after crossing over Rajpath, one passes the National Archives on the left (not open to the public) and another cultural institution on the right: the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA). A centre for research that also promotes exhibitions, it is housed in two buildings that were meant to be temporary (an army mess dating from the 1930s, and an exhibition space hastily erected in the 1990s) and one that is incomplete. After its establishment in 1987, an international competition was held to produce a design for the many libraries and galleries that were projected to cover the sprawling campus. Amid numerous superb entries from architects from India and abroad, the selection committee chose a truly atrocious design by the American architect Ralph Lerner, and it is only a small consolation that just one of the buildings was constructed (and that too remains unfinished). Despite this, the IGNCA succeeds in publishing scholarly books and staging innovative exhibitions.

  Further north up Janpath on the left is the Imperial, one of Delhi’s grandest hotels, designed by Geoffrey Blomfield, in a streamlined Art Deco style. The hotel went into decline in the 1970s but has since been renovated with lush new interiors in a manner that is nostalgically reminiscent of the typical Indian club—a superior kind of Gymkhana. On the walls of the central corridor and the main reception rooms hang aquatints and engravings of Indian views, mainly by British artists from the Daniells to William Simpson: a veritable art gallery and one of the finest collections of such views to be found outside the British Library. The bar and the veranda cafe (named 1911, after the Delhi Durbar of that year) are also well worth a visit.

  The modern building that looms opposite the Imperial, with some dangerous-looking cantilevers, was designed by Raj Rewal. It houses the Central Cottage Industries Emporium—the main government-run outlet for handicrafts. The eccentrically octagonal windows and stone cladding are meant to evoke the architectural forms of older parts of Delhi (see p. 132).

  Round the corner in Tolstoy Marg is one of those older parts though with an equally startling geometry: the Jantar Mantar is one of the astronomical observatories of Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II of Jaipur (p. 84). When it was built in the early eighteenth century, the land belonged to Jaipur. Indeed a large swathe of what is now New Delhi once belonged to Jaipur and had to be purchased from Sawai Jai Singh II’s later successor, Maharaja Sawai Madho Singh II, when the city was laid out. A little to the west, on Baba Kharak Singh Marg, is a Hanuman temple of which the Jaipur maharajas were the original patrons; and a Sikh gurdwara known as Bangla Sahib—so called because the founder, Guru Har Krishan, was permitted to take up residence in the compound of what was then the ‘lord’s bungalow’, the Delhi residence of the Jaipur ruler. Although these two sacred sites are visited by many pilgrims daily, their historical associations are largely forgotten, as new layers of meaning take over. In the same way, few now visit the Jantar Mantar in order to study eighteenth-century astronomy. They go there because (like India Gate) it has become a site of protest—in this case largely political. The Jantar Mantar is where you go if you want to agitate or fast to show your disapproval of the government. So Delhi’s Jaipur connection is most visible not here but at our route’s starting point: in the elegant Jaipur Column that stands proudly in the forecourt in front of Rashtrapati Bhavan, donated as a reminder of the previous landlord.

  Kashmiri Gate and Beyond

  There is a cluster of historic buildings in the far northern part of the old city, once the focal point of the early British settlement (in the first half of the nineteenth century, before the 1857 Revolt). From in front of the Red Fort, if you take the main road northwards, and pass under the railway line, you come onto Lothian Road. On an island in the middle of the road is what remains of the gateways of the British magazine. The magazine itself was blown up by its British defenders in 1857, to prevent it falling into the hands of the sepoy forces taking control of Delhi. Continue up Lothian Road and you come, on the left, to what is currently the office of the Election Commission, but built as the original St Stephen’s College, in 1890, designed by Samuel Swinton Jacob. The consulting engineer to the princely state of Jaipur, Jacob developed an architectural practice that promoted a revivalist style and—at least in Rajasthan—exemplified an admirable method of collaboration with local craftsmen. At the end of his career he served briefly as an unwanted adviser on Indian architecture to Lutyens. This early building is not his best work. In fact, it’s rather grim. But it shows how Jacob, in Delhi, tried to respond to Lodi-era monuments (just as he responded, more successfully, to living local traditions when in Jaipur).

  Further up and obliquely across, as the road opens up into a square, is St James’s Church, built in 1835 by James Skinner, and designed by Robert Smith (of Qutb-cupola fame, p. 14). It is an elegant neoclassical building, with a Greek cross plan. Among the graves in the graveyard are those of two British residents of Delhi: William Fraser, who was murdered in 1835 (and his grave was vandalized in 1857—he was unpopular in some quarters) and Thomas Metcalfe, who died in 1853. St James’s was the most important church for the early British community in Delhi. Its patron, James Skinner, was an Anglo-Indian who battled against prejudice to become a powerful ally of the British.

  From the church it is a short walk to Kashmiri Gate, the northern gate of the old city, and the point at which forces under Brig
adier Nicholson entered to recapture Delhi on 14 September 1857. It still bears the scars of that encounter. After the event it was not restored but preserved as a sort of shrine to British courage in the face of horror.

  Outside the gate, if you can get past the bus terminal and the busy Metro station and cross Lala Hardev Sahai Marg, and enter Sham Nath Marg, you will find, on the left, the cemetery in which Nicholson is buried and, on the right, the remains of the Qudsia Bagh, a garden palace built in 1748 for the favourite queen (a former dancing girl) of Muhammad Shah Rangila. Today, there is just a gateway, a baradari and a mosque. Much of the rest seems to have been destroyed in 1857, not because it was expressly targeted but simply because it stood in the line of fire between the sepoy forces defending the city walls and the British forces assembled on the ridge to the north-west.

  If you proceed onto the ridge, you can visit the Mutiny Memorial, a Gothic spire erected in 1863 with a plaque commemorating those who fell on the British side, and a postscript, added in 1972, honouring the heroism of their adversaries. Beyond it lies the campus of Delhi University, which includes the home of St Stephen’s College since 1939, designed by Walter George (p. 115).

  Central New Delhi—North

  The route starts at the Anglican cathedral (the Cathedral Church of the Redemption, on Church Road on the north side of Rashtrapati Bhavan, p. 112) and proceeds north, via North Avenue and a section of Mother Teresa Crescent, to the original post office, the Gol Dak-khana and the Catholic Cathedral of the Sacred Heart (p. 112). Continuing up Baba Kharak Singh Marg, you pass both Bangla Sahib Gurdwara and the Hanuman Mandir (p. 154), to New Delhi’s original main shopping centre, Connaught Place (designed by Robert Tor Russell, 1920s, p. 115). The fortunes of Connaught Place come and go. Situated between the ceremonial buildings of the central vista and the old city, it was conceived as the new commercial hub. All the smartest shops, restaurants and cinemas were here. With the establishment of many district markets across the city in the late twentieth century, CP began to lose its pre-eminence and shine. It started to look shabby. But restoration work and the coming of the Metro (there is a major station under its central garden) have restored its fortunes. Among the glittering showrooms of international retail chains, some of the original establishments—coffee houses and pastry shops—are still there, burnished but otherwise unchanged, allowing one to indulge in a little 1930s nostalgia, if that is to your taste.