by Dave Prager
The feeling of wandering the Hundred Acre Woods was exacerbated when we started paying attention to the retail outlets: Connaught Place was an infinite loop of Van Heusen stores.
But on subsequent visits, when we looked closer, we saw treasures. Independent antiquity still survived behind the brand names. There were restaurants with both the décor and uniformed waiters of colonial times, ancient tailors and dusty keymakers sitting in alcoves surrounded by antique tools, hand-painted signs that made the area a study in 1950s typography, and two branches of Saravana Bhavan, the most delicious south Indian restaurant in the city.
There were also the elements that support CP’s reputation as a shopping-and-retail destination: clubs, restaurants, a nice central park, and a creepy underground capitalistic free-for-all called Palika Bazaar, in which all laws protecting copyright and restraining pornography were apparently suspended. CP was also the closest thing Delhi had to a downtown business district: the city had seeded one of its radial spokes with a small collection of fifteen- or twentystory buildings that ranged architecturally from striking to shocking. But, just like many of the corporate campuses we visited in the Delhi region, the buildings weren’t built with pedestrians in mind. Fences, walls and gates flourished, the buildings were set back far from the street and the ground levels lacked retail—all of which discouraged casual strolling, making the area feel deserted even in the middle of the day.
Soon after we’d arrived in Delhi, we’d hung a map of the city in our living room. (“Why do all foreigners have maps of Delhi hanging in their living rooms?” my boss Murali laughed when he first saw it.) We’d scrutinize our map on weekend mornings to decide which part of the city we’d visit next. “Model Town sounds idyllic.” “Friends Colony sounds welcoming.” “Let’s try a tropical theme: Bali Nagar, and then Sunlight Colony.” But in those first few weeks, our gazes returned again and again to the Yamuna River, a big blue north–south swatch cutting through the gray of the map near Old Delhi, Connaught Place and attractions like the Red Fort.
We’d read that the Yamuna was one of Hinduism’s holiest rivers. So we imagined a waterfront boardwalk developed equally for leisure and for spiritual matters, with sidewalk cafés overlooking ancient ghats still in constant use, and Segways for rent by the hour. The Lonely Planet may not have mentioned it, but cities like London, Paris and New York are defined by and built around their great rivers; why wouldn’t Delhi be the same? We noted the proximity to the Yamuna of the great green splotch on our map labeled “Raj Ghat.” That green splotch extended all the way to the blue stripe, so we figured that Raj Ghat must be a large park with a splendid view of the river. So that’s where we went.
And while Raj Ghat is a lovely park (it was built around the spot where Gandhi was cremated), it was entirely unconnected with the river so nearby. We wandered the paths and read the signs, knowing that a “ghat” is a series of steps leading to water, like the ones that line the Ganges in Varanasi; surely there were ghats around here somewhere, with old ladies selling orange garlands and flickering candles floating peacefully down the river at sunset.
But we never found it. Every path that seemed promising dead-ended in impenetrable woods. Google Maps later showed us that Raj Ghat was a half-mile from the water. Maybe it used to abut the water at one time, before the Yamuna’s cyclical flooding changed its course. If we’d pushed through those woods bordering the park, we would have stumbled onto farm fields—yes, farm fields, there in the middle of the city.
The Yamuna’s fertile floodplain is lined with acres and acres of farmland, even as the river passes through the heart of the city sixteen million people call home. (Or perhaps many more—in his book Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity, Sam Miller argues that some definitions of the city’s limits put the population at over twenty million, which would make Delhi the world’s most populous city.) In most global cities, the banks of the city’s biggest rivers are the domain of either industry or leisure, but in Delhi, this coveted real estate is reserved for farmers. And the fact that farms buffer the Yamuna for almost its entire journey through Delhi (although the area directly north and east of Raj Ghat was once a massive slum, until its 150,000 homes were razed in 20041) suggests that farmers are so politically powerful as to have forced the city to grow around them.
Aside from when we crossed the bridges on the road to Uttar Pradesh, the only time we actually saw the Yamuna was during our visit to Majnu Ka Tila, the “Little Tibet” neighborhood a few miles north of the Red Fort. Wandering the lanes, Jenny and I caught a glimpse of water through an alley. We eagerly rushed forward, expecting to finally find our boardwalk, anticipating a nice little hiking trail down to the water, assuming that, at the least, there would be a riverfront café where we could grab a cold beer. But where the alley broke through the buildings, we stopped short. There were a few rickety stepping stones, there were some farmers, there were some cattle, there was some brownish water in the distance past the fields, and there was the faint smell of the river detectable even this far away. There was nothing any tourist would want to see.
The farmers stared at us. We glumly returned to the market and bought a bootlegged Guns N’ Roses CD.
Unlike Cairo or Singapore or Mumbai or New York, where water is a central part of each city’s identity, Delhi’s river is walled off and forgotten by everyone except those who farm it, the municipal and private entities who dump their waste into it, and anyone who stops to think about where their sewage goes and where their drinking water comes from. (Delhi uses 210 million gallons of relatively clean water2 from upstream points on the Yamuna for drinking purposes every day.3 It has to use upstream water because, while the Delhi region is just one percent of the river’s total catchment area, the city contributes more than fifty percent of the river’s pollutants.4)
So for all purposes of cultural life and urban design, Delhi is a riverless city, with the Yamuna out of sight and out of mind. Perhaps that’s because the politicians who could do something to improve the Yamuna’s state are too busy sipping gimlets in Lutyens’s Delhi.
Lutyens’ Delhi is the “New” Delhi that the British built to underscore their conviction that imperial ideals could introduce civility and decorum even to a city as barbaric as they viewed nineteenth-century Delhi to be. Their uninvited benevolence manifested in the razing and remaking of ten square miles5 of villages, farms and parts of the Old City in the Empire’s image of itself: mathematical boulevards on a monumental scale, whitewashed bungalows for proper gentlefolk, monolithic and imposing government buildings, and the uncanny utilization of street design as a tool for maintaining power.
Edward Lutyens, a famous English architect, began designing this New Delhi in 1912. Almost a century later, the area still sings his opera of bureaucracy, his tribute to deaf government expressed in the voice of urban planning. A mile south of Connaught Place, Lutyens’s Delhi is impersonal, maddening and exhausting. The wide, featureless streets break off in geometrically precise directions from indistinguishable roundabouts, keeping traffic both busily moving forward and not quite sure which direction forward is. There is almost nothing to see between the roundabouts except for trees and walls; the streetscape almost entirely lacks buildings, houses, shops, vendors, or anything else to break up the monotony, and the trees and walls themselves are only there to hide whatever is going on behind them—as are the guards whose mustaches and guns make it clear that we shouldn’t try to find out. The greenery is admittedly beautiful, but even the trees seem placed to deliberately avoid providing shade for anyone walking on the sidewalk.
Lutyens’ Delhi may be among the most unwalkable urban landscapes in the world. That’s because pedestrians in the area are confronted with endless, featureless boulevards that only reinforce how hot it is and how far there is to go until the next featureless intersection. The design of New Delhi is calculated to deter and depress anyone not being driven by a chauffeur already trained to know the way. For a pedestrian, these streets are withou
t comfort, without amenity and without end.
And these streets seem to articulate a certain philosophy of power: that the seat of government is not meant to be accessible to the people. New Delhi was designed for empire, but its present democratic occupants don’t seem terribly troubled about being so inaccessible. Today, this area is where the national government does its business, and where the powerful enjoy fresh air and quiet streets as they exchange handshakes and imported whisky and suitcases full of money. Stringent laws protect the area from new construction, ensuring that those inside its walls can indefinitely relax among manicured lawns and cooling breezes.
Delhi crams sixteen million people into a cityscape built to house and support far fewer. Regulations on building height have forced the city to retain its low-rise profile when it so desperately needs to grow upward. But those who have the legislative power to relieve the pressures of population density are spared its indignities, spending their time in the one area of the city that actually has elbowroom. Preservationists are right that there is historical value to this area, but wasting this huge and vastly underutilized belt of land on political vanity is a crime. It’s beautiful to look at and nice to drive through, but those pleasures don’t justify sustaining this lifeless void, this corrupting vacuum. Old Delhi is called the Walled City, but Old Delhi is far more open and welcoming than the Delhi that Lutyens built.
We had very little business inside Lutyens’ Delhi, but we traveled fairly frequently to Chanakyapuri, just to its west. Chanakyapuri is not technically attributable to Lutyens, but it is almost identical in its spirit of exclusion. It boasts more embassies and swanky hotels than we could visit in a week of lounge-hopping and ambassador-fêting. Dinner in this neighborhood costs more than the guy who drives us there earns in a month. At the entrance to each hotel, a huge valet in full Rajasthani costume—complete with champion mustache—waits for the guard at the gate to dutifully certify that our taxi’s undercarriage is free of bombs so he can open the car door for us. To make it past this bouncer, an Indian has to have the clothes, the car and the mannerisms to certify a certain level of status; for foreigners, as our autorickshaw drops us off in dusty sandals and sweaty T-shirts, all we have to do is be white.
Jenny and I periodically patronized these bastions of exclusivity, we admit. The income we earned in Delhi—which would have made us barely middle class in New York—put us in the highest tiers of Indian society, and we have a weakness for wine that isn’t stored in the hot recesses of a state-run liquor store that caters primarily to on-duty autorickshaw drivers. Still, it wasn’t entirely possible to enjoy our $50 Japanese yakitori on the same day we’d pay Shilpa, our bungalow’s sweeper, $6 for her full month of work.
We learned the importance of going into both Lutyens’s Delhi or Chanakyapuri with a pre-planned exit strategy. On the Sunday night that our friend Penny invited us for drinks at the Canadian embassy, we’d stumble back onto Indian soil to the starkest reminder that everyone in this area could afford their own car: no empty autorickshaws were cruising around looking for fares. So silent were those nighttime streets that we heard an autorickshaw approaching from a half-mile away, a little lawnmower engine slowly puttering up the vast expanse of road. Our hopes rose, visions of our pillows tickled our sleepy minds, but then the dark shape in the back seat told us that this autorickshaw was occupied, and that we were best off walking to India Gate to find a lift.
Ah, India Gate! The one location in Lutyens’s Delhi that defied Lutyens’ best intentions.
India Gate is located towards the eastern end of Rajpath, the vast avenue that is the centerpiece of Lutyens’ Delhi. Rajpath originates at Raisina Hill, where the presidential palace, the secretariat building and the parliament all look down upon the masses trudging the long avenues before them. Rajpath is the perfect setting for Delhi’s yearly Republic Day parades, providing a glorious runway to showcase marching men and machines and missiles. On any day not dedicated to the magnificence of the country, Rajpath is, by design, best appreciated from the interior of a horse-drawn carriage, and then only if you have at least two menservants fanning you to keep you cool.
But India Gate didn’t turn out as Lutyens intended, because there are few places in the city where everyday people feel more welcome. An Arc de Triomphe-style monument designed to commemorate those who died in service of the British Indian Army, this contribution to the Empire’s eternal grandeur has been appropriated by men, women and children as a place to gather when the sun goes down.
It’s an inspiring sight. And it’s a side of India whose existence the Western media hadn’t prepared us to expect. From all the news reports and documentaries we’d seen about India, we were anticipating only extremes: pious thousands bathing at sunrise at the Varanasi ghats; dazzling rainbows of saris drying in the wind; heart-wrenching poverty, blindingly modern malls, catastrophically overcrowded trains. All these images of India are cliché in the West. But what we never expected—because our media had never suggested it existed—were the simple, everyday pleasures of an evening at India Gate: ice cream vendors, laughing kids, strolling newlyweds, teenage boys pretending not to notice teenage girls, aunties glaring at teenage boys, happy parents, kite flyers, toy peddlers, snack sellers, and every other complement to the Indian nuclear family.
It’s hard to overstate how unprepared we were for this sight. The Western media perpetuates images of poor Indians, praying Indians and eagerly globalizing Indians. And because we can’t easily empathize with any of those images (the poverty is beyond our experience, the devotion is entirely unlike our churches and synagogues, and the spread of American-style consumerism just makes us uncomfortable), our media had primed us to anticipate the alien and the exotic. And that was the opposite of the scene at India Gate. We never expected to find something so familiar in India.
As wonderful and magical as India Gate is, however—not just for the experience but also for its symbolic rejection of Lutyens—it wasn’t what we came to India to find. We wanted the India we’d been conditioned to expect: vibrant people doing fantastic things as their everyday routine. So let’s travel southward, where we’ll immediately get stuck in traffic. Because now we’re in south Delhi.
South Delhi’s roughly 250 square kilometers are broadly defined by National Highway 8 on the west and the Yamuna on the east. It’s an arc of Indian suburbia: privately built bungalows, public housing developments, schools, slums, hospitals, parks, markets, malls, and endless traffic that was exacerbated by (and is now marginally alleviated by) the construction of the southern extensions of Delhi’s Metro system. South Delhi’s geographic center falls generally in the neighborhood of Hauz Khas market, which is by coincidence exactly where we lived.
Hauz Khas market should not be confused with Hauz Khas village, the arts-and-boutiques district in the middle of the park two miles to the west. Nor should it be confused with Hauz Khas Enclave, the posh landscape of massive houses and manicured gardens to the south. Our Hauz Khas was a residential neighborhood of three- and fourstory concrete bungalows, lively street life, and a utilitarian central market in which mom-and-pop stores still outnumbered the modern restaurants and branded appliance retailers that were starting to replace them in so many other markets. The four main shopping streets of Hauz Khas market bordered a central park in which men napped, teens played cricket, and mothers let their kids loose on the sparse playground.
To the east were trendier enclaves like Greater Kailash-I and Greater Kailash-II, where we could eat at restaurants with names like “Diva” and “Nûdeli.” To the south were neighborhoods like Malviya Nagar and Saket, where many of our twenty-something co-workers lived. And to the west were wealthier areas like Vasant Vihar and Shanti Niketan, with broad streets, houses like castles, Ferraris parked behind iron gates, and private security guards staring sleepily. Hauz Khas was the ideal neighborhood for us: it was just off the road that led straight to Gurgaon, the satellite city in which I worked, and it was central enough to giv
e us easy access to all points of the city. Although in south Delhi, ‘easy access’ is a relative term.
There are six or seven major north–south boulevards and about half as many east–west ones that divide south Delhi into distinct segments. And as in Lutyens’s Delhi, these boulevards are designed only for driving. Not shopping, not walking, just driving. This single-minded purpose means that most things related to the living of life—residential, retail, recreation, religion—are pushed to the center of these street-bound segments. The focus of each boulevard-bound segment is not outward towards the city, but inward into itself.
The difficulties of traveling between segments reinforce their separation. There are few bridges across the main boulevards, so crossing from one segment to the other requires driving up a traffic-heavy street, making a U-turn, and driving back down to enter the new segment directly across from where we exited the first segment ten minutes earlier. For example, our flat in Hauz Khas market was located just east of Aurobindo Marg. On the opposite side of that busy boulevard was a neighborhood called Green Park, which would have been a three-minute walk away if the traffic on Aurobindo Marg didn’t make walking so terrifying. Because we rarely dared to dash across that dangerous street, and because the same journey by autorickshaw would have included a frustrating gauntlet of red lights and U-turns, we hardly ever went to Green Park.