DELHI BY HEART

by Raza Rumi

  The old, sometimes smoothly and at other times rather awkwardly, co-exists with the new in Delhi. In fact, neither the old is old nor the new is new. The blurring of lines makes it all exciting. The Harappans, the Aryans, the Turko-Mughals and the British, all exist in a manner that would overawe any mortal. Small wonder that India is such an exotic destination for foreign tourists despite the problematic infrastructure and rather inhospitable weather.

  10

  The New Delhis

  I

  t was a noisy morning when I arrived at the Central Secretariat, which is rather unimaginatively plonked between the North and South Blocks. In Pakistan too, the secretariats are divided into blocks named after the prosaic letters of the English alphabetical system. For instance, if you wish to reach the Ministry of Finance in Islamabad you need to find ‘S’ block rather than a particular building. It appears that statehood requires state institutions to exist in an un-historical, nameless world.

  But the North and South Blocks of Delhi are majestic, possibly reflecting the secret yearning of the Raj to follow the earlier empires that it had displaced. Thus came into being Lutyens’s Delhi.

  The British announced their shift of capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911. At a durbar, King George presented himself before his Indian subjects, including my great grandfather who was present on this occasion, and declared that this ‘… new creation may be in every way worthy of this ancient and beautiful city.’1

  This ‘New’ Delhi took almost two decades to be completed and cost fifteen million pounds, quite obviously paid by Indians through unjust taxation and extracted profits and who had yet to practice the politics of non-cooperation. The chief architects of this imperial splendour were Sir Edwin Lutyens and his assistant, Herbert Baker. Lutyens was son-in-law of a former viceroy, Lord Irwin, thus reinforcing and continuing the imperial traditions of power. This is not to say that he was not a good choice; his creations remain imposing in design and execution. It has been estimated that nearly 30,000 construction workers built this new city. We have little idea how many may have died. Shahjahanabad was also erected on dead bodies, they say.

  Lutyens’s city was inspired by Washington, DC, a planned city. The extravagant Vice Regal Lodge, renamed Rashtrapati Bhavan after India’s Independence, was built on the crest of the Ridge. It is said that after Independence, Mahatma Gandhi wanted the building to be converted into a hospital but not many were interested in implementing this radical idea.

  The wide sweeping avenue, the famous ‘Kings Way’, Indianized as Rajpath, winds through the War Memorial arch or India Gate and meanders towards Purana Qila erected on the site of the legendary Indraprastha. The circular colonnade is adjacent to the North Block of the Indian Secretariat and leads to Parliament House that is further connected to Connaught Circus, that exclusive space for white men and women to shop and relax and lighten their burden of civilizing the natives so many years ago. The road from Connaught Circus continues towards Shahjahanabad, culminating at the Jama Masjid. In so many ways, the imagined ‘New Delhi’ connected both the ancient and medieval Delhis with little effort, the design unwittingly facilitating it.

  The hexagonal centre point of this new city was Connaught Place. Its concentric rows of colonnaded shops were the commercial part of the city. Now popularly known as ‘CP’, Connaught Place, named after the Duke of Connaught, uncle of King George V, is a circular plaza, with seven colonnaded sections intercut initially by seven radial roads. CP now barely appears to be the fulcrum it was designed to be, swamped as it is by skyscrapers, not to mention a metro station in its womb. The stand-alone shops are now closing down and retail fast-food chains dot CP. It has lost its unique character and is being converted to a consumer paradise without much identity.

  Why should one complain about this? History is shaped by those living today. Let the historians and urban planners of tomorrow decide what comes first, heritage or livelihoods.

  On my first visit, my colleague (from the international organization that I was working for then), handled the heavily bureaucracy-controlled entry into the Secretariat. Manual entries, paper slips with carbon copies and then a little waiting. I don’t mind it at all. The architecture, with its red sandstone arches and long corridors are spellbinding. There are lists of names and some black and white images of some Indian politicians and Raj officials of the early twentieth century. The sahibs must have moved freely inside while at the same time, restricting the entry of the natives. I notice that portraits of Indian leaders are also hung on the walls of the long stairways. As we wait for a meeting, I sneak out to walk along the corridors where Azad, Patel and Nehru must have walked in their khadi clothes. These inspired revolutionaries, steeped in both the eastern ethos and the western idea of democracy, had chosen to retain these buildings as the hub of a new proud India after 1947. Ironic, some might say.

  The offices are grand with huge oval desks where exalted babus sit to implement the destiny of India decided by crafty politicians. How could one not rule from these imperial offices that embody such power? It is only here that one understands why the central state and its overarching powers were so dear to the founding fathers of modern India. And why the proposals for a loose confederation and a relatively weak centre were not acceptable to the Congress leadership.

  Lutyens made no attempt to hide his contempt for indigenous Indian architecture. An article in the Telegraph says that the Viceroy’s house ‘rejected’ the Mughal style. Lutyens believed that Indian architecture, including the Taj Mahal, was not meant to be a treasure for posterity. He considered the Taj Mahal ‘wonderful, but it is not architecture… I do not believe there is any really Indian architecture at all, or any great tradition.’2 To him, the urban landscape dotted with Muslim monuments was a nuisance, and as he wrote to his wife, ‘You must sit on your haunches covered with jewels and little else by way of clothing’ to appreciate these monuments. His contempt for the Hindu architectural style was equally strong, ‘Set square stones and built child-wise… before you erect, carve every stone differently and independently with lace patterns and terrifying shapes…’3

  After 1947, the erstwhile natives assumed charge of the colonial state, changed its nomenclature and trappings while retaining the core of Raj systems and governance. The steel frame of the Raj administration was too strong to be replaced entirely, but over time, politics has made inroads and pierced holes thus rendering it a strange mix of tradition, executive power and political expediency. Across South Asia, the civil bureaucracy continues to rule even after sixty-five years.

  According to popular lore, all the Raj buildings of New Delhi have been attributed to Lutyens, rather erroneously. The victim of this misrepresentation has been the unsung architect, R.T. Russell, chief architect to the Government of India, who designed several peripheral government buildings, bungalows and offices of New Delhi. Lutyens built only four bungalow-residences for the Viceroy’s staff that are now enclosed in the Rashtrapati Bhavan’s security zone, as well as the Hyderabad and Baroda Houses near India Gate. The cliché called ‘Lutyens’s Delhi’ is not all that true as many others were part of the new imperial Delhi project.

  It was Russell who designed and built Connaught Place, Eastern and Western Courts, the Commander-in-Chief ’s house (now Teen Murti House), Delhi’s civil airport, Irwin Stadium (now National Stadium), and nearly 4,000 plus government residences that are now occupied by the new elites—judges, politicians and top bureaucrats. Herbert Baker made seven bungalows or ‘bungle-ohs’ as Lutyens joked, easily forgetting that it was Baker who helped him win the contracts in the first place. I cannot help but laugh when I hear that these same ‘bungle-ohs’ are now attributed to Lutyens!

  My meetings with Indian civil servants at the north and south Blocks and catching up with a few old acquaintances from my stint at the United Nations, were pleasurable. The settings were so marvellous that I had to ask one of those exalted babus, a mighty secretary, whose room it was during the pre-194
7 days. The mere mention of the Raj brings a twinkle to the eye of many a bureaucrat in South Asia since it legitimizes a sense of imperial succession. The Indian Civil Service is a venerated one to this day. Later, I took tours with peons who show me the buildings, little rooms, huge corridors and even some old furniture which has escaped the collector’s acquisitive eye.

  Often, it was a rather strange experience mixed with admiration and sadness. South Asia remains deeply problematic, with deeply embedded post-colonial features that have been debated ad nauseum in political science studies, ironically by the very universities located in the heart of neo-imperialism’s darkness.

  The towels on the backs of the chairs of babus, both of middle and junior rank, is part of a tradition that keeps them dry during hot weather. Muted television sets dot their rooms flashing news or cricket. These were all too familiar to me because of their uncanny similarity to the culture of the Pakistani Civil Services.

  Post 1947, Delhi began to acquire a modern, socialist, matter-of-fact look. The National Museum building, built in 1949, retained some colonial elements but it was ‘modern’. The new government offices, commemorative buildings and residences built after the British left, were all squares of concrete, shedding the ostentation of earlier times. This is also true for the buildings in Pakistan. The disconnect is severe, not just in terms of aesthetics, but in the shunning of building heritage such as the use of materials like limestone, ideally suited to the arid heat and extreme winters of Delhi or for that matter, Lahore. Generations of skilled artisans were removed from an architecture that became mere structures lacking character altogether.

  Heritage is tricky business. Rejecting it served a political purpose as a new history had to be written with a clear script of Independence and visual novelty. Socialist modernism that sprung elsewhere began to take root on Delhi’s urban canvas. Yet another foreign style entered Delhi’s soul. In the words of Ranjana Sengupta, the brilliant chronicler of Delhi, ‘Any main street in Delhi will yield at least two modernist buildings, probably more. This is the look we identify with large government offices, schools and auditoria built through the fifties, sixties and seventies, many of them appearing ramshackle and derelict today… Shastri Bhavan and Udyog Bhavan, built in the fifties are early examples, as… is AG’s Office near the ITO.’4

  This trend was to continue till the eighties with rare exceptions such as the 1962 India International Centre and the 1969 Jawaharlal Nehru Library within the Teen Murti Bhavan. Otherwise, much of Delhi’s architecture reflected the rather prosaic permutations of modernism. The Indian Institute of Technology campus and the Jawaharlal Nehru University buildings are ample testimony to this new aesthetic norm. The latter is, however, saved by its rustic environs and a sense of space that gives it a rather medieval feel.

  Among the new buildings, the Baha’i Temple inaugurated in 1996, sitting atop the Kalkaji hill in south Delhi, is an inventive architectural statement. A lovingly landscaped garden encircles the chiselled marble edifice. The twenty-seven marble ‘petals’ arranged in clusters of three form nine sides. The lotus, a sacred symbol of both Hindu and Buddhist faiths, is the leitmotif of the structure.

  As I enter the hall, I feel the sunlight splintering into it and caressing my skin. The rays refract through the inner folds of the gigantic lotus petals and create the desired magic of dimension and depth. This diffused effect inside the dome was mesmerizing and I did not want to leave the room. Outside, there are multiple pools in the landscaped garden to provide the necessary ambience to the lotus design. The design also scripts the essential tenet of the Baha’i faith, namely, the unity of religions which is celebrated here through visual representations and architectural innovations.

  The New Delhi of Lutyens, Baker and Russell, among others, is no longer new or representative of the urban upheavals that have shaken Delhi since 1947. There is a new megapolis in place of the old New Delhi composed of several new setttlements and ‘cities’ in their own right. It is home to over 20 million residents.5 Given their eclectic individuality, these myriad Delhis are often ignored. Compared to the Muslims of Old Delhi and power-obsessed residents of Chanakyapuri, the new clustered Delhis may not care for grand architectures or romantic Persian poetry but manifest the new and the single most tangible ethic: money.

  Places like Punjabi Bagh or Paschim Vihar are products of the great historical churning called the Partition. These places may not boast of artists or monuments but they are inhabited by people who, with their hard work and clever business acumen, changed the face of Delhi. They represent Delhi’s consumerist future and are the economic models for its less affluent. Punjabi Bagh, Rohini (with its Disneyland-like Adventure Island), Tilak Nagar, Uttam Nagar etc., are the new Delhis that are aspiring to be ‘upmarket’ with flashy malls, McDonalds and torrents of new money.

  Punjabi Bagh is West Delhi’s happy haven for wealthy Sikh businessmen and other Punjabi-speaking people. Earlier known as ‘Refugee Colony’, the neighbourhood was re-christened by Prime Minister Nehru in 1954. Refugees from Pakistani Punjab settled here after Partition and had to prove their worth in the new homeland. These identity-seeking migrants and their descendants have been sheer engines of wealth creation in post-Partition Delhi and brought in ‘Punjabiyat’ or the Punjabi flavour to the more refined and aesthetic imperial Delhi. Indeed, the old residents, a tiny minority in the megapolis, continue to complain about the ‘Punjabification’ of a Delhi that has changed before their eyes.

  Jangpura’s name can be traced back to an obscure Englishman called Colonel Young who acquired an estate on either side of Mathura Road just south of Nizamuddin. Legend has it that many of the original residents of Young Pura were refugees from the village of Raisina, which was obliterated by the construction of the Vice Regal Palace. Similarly, Alakananda, near hip and trendy Greater Kailash and the Bengali neighbourhood of Chittaranjan Park, is an upwardly mobile middle-class residential area of south Delhi. It emerged as a liveable locality in the late 1970s. The various apartment blocks were built by the Delhi Development Authority after Indira Gandhi’s reviled Emergency. There was an imperative to provide comfortable housing for the growing middle-class, resulting in insipid apartment blocks made poetic by naming them after rivers and mountains—Mandakini, Gangotri, Yamunotri, Aravalli and Nilgiri.

  Little Lhasa or Majnu ka Tila, near Kashmiri Gate, is a Tibetan ghetto. The name ‘Tila’ is inspired by the nearby gurdwara, Majnu ka Tila, which was built on the spot where a fifteenth-century Muslim hermit attained enlightenment after being blessed by Guru Nanak. Early Tibetan refugees settled here in the ’60s when their numbers became too large for the Ladakh Bodh Vihara to accommodate. The ghetto houses several hundred families and sells, in Delhi terms, ‘authentic’ Tibetan food like Gyuma (sausages) and Iowa Khatsa (spicy stuffed lungs) and, of course, momos and noodle soups called thukpas.

  Another Delhi is the overwhelmingly Muslim settlement, Nasbandi Colony, situated in the National Capital Region (NCR) in Ghaziabad (‘nasbandi’ means sterilization). As the friend who took me there put it, ‘The world appears to be sterile here. Unpainted houses smacked of aborted undertakings.’ The streets were strewn with refuse. Goats and people were scampering along the edges. Flies everywhere—on buffalo meat, over-ripened mangoes, and infants in hanging baskets. It is just across the border from Delhi and yet it could be from another era.

  The underclass of unskilled labour of Nasbandi slum is necessary in order for the other Delhis to flourish. There is no government college here and local children attend madrassas. Nasbandi Colony’s past is interesting. Twenty years ago, Sunehra Khatoon, mother of three children, shifted from Seemapuri to the urban metropolis. Sunehra went to get herself sterilized for birth control and six months later, as promised by a government policy, she was awarded a free fifty-square-yard plot in the neighbourhood. Many joined this scheme through which the government hoped to address the population growth. Thousands underwent sterilizations in order to get free
plots.

  My friend Naina and her husband Vivek lived in South Extension called Dakshin Vistaar in Hindi. They moved to Bombay in 2008. Its lanes and tree-lined roads have bungalows made in nouveau architecture which are hybrid structures of modernist flat shapes combined with an attempt to transport American, gothic and Greek features. South Ext. has a huge market in the vicinity. It boasts of high-end sari emporiums and jewellers such as Mehrasons. Levi’s, Tommy Hilfiger and Benetton are some of the branded shops. Before meeting Naina and Vivek, I would browse around at Midlands book store or Teksons with the rather blunt lady owner. Timeless Art Book Studio is a haven of peace and beauty away from the smog and chaos of the city.

  The busy and often clogged Ring Road slices South Ext. into half and creates South Ext. 1 and South Ext. 2. Lying cheek by jowl with the glitzy consumer paradise of South Ext. 1 is Kotla Mubarakpur, one of Delhi’s seven urban villages. An uppity neighbourhood with natty bungalows lies behind the shops of South Ext. 2. Affluent and reeking of wealth, the whole colony is traumatized by the messy parking of the marketplace of South Ext. 2. Countless parked cars leave little room to walk around. The posh and opulent can turn into congestion and a municipal nightmare in a minute. The intersections between inner enclaves and the outer reality of the Ring Road combined with the overcrowded side roads are fascinating.

  I was often invited to the restaurants in Defence Colony market. This colony, known for its affluent housing, boasts bungalows, big cars and imposing gates manned by uniformed security guards. The colony came into being to facilitate retired army officers. It is also a popular residential place for Delhi’s expats who like it for its ‘shining India’ bubble. The leafy lanes and well-trimmed parks are charming, but once again, the landscape changes in a few minutes as soon as you hit the busy Ring Road.