Can India’s capital be salvaged? A Delhite mulls over what her beloved city was and now, is
Mutiny to early Independence years
The enclosing wall of Shahjahanabad, built in the 1820s, was dismantled in sections from 1857. To the north was laid out the Civil Lines, to the west the Sadar Bazaar, and there was east-west ribbon development because of the laying of the railway line in the 1860s. Three ‘Durbars’ (a spectacle that lasted a few days) made areas of east Delhi familiar. As a result, when the leap in the dark was taken in 1911 to shift the winter capital from Calcutta to Delhi, there were many choices — north, east, and south. The choice of and laying out of New Delhi south of Shahjahanabad led to the latter being called ‘Old Delhi’ (a term earlier used for Mehrauli). The World War and the need to economise on costs led to delays, but the capital was in place by the 1930s (at the same time as Canberra in Australia).
My sense of the city was Lutyens’ New Delhi. Our family moved into a house in Ratendon (later Amrita Shergil) Road, south of which was a forest (later made into a nursery, and still later laid out into a ‘colony’ next to an old Mughal garden, Jor Bagh. I was allowed out of the house only to a section of the — rather wild — Lady Willingdon Park. At bedtime, I used to bully my mother to lift me up to say goodnight to the domes of Safdarjang’s Maqbara, backlit to warn aeroplanes descending to the airport. Till I was eleven, New Delhi was dew-drenched grass, sleeping on charpoys under clear starry skies, lovely winter gardens carefully tended with advice from Percy Lancaster, Head Gardener at Sundar Nursery. June saw sudden dust-storms (the ‘lu’, which a century earlier, Ghalib had said dried up the ink in his inkwell); occasionally the sky was black with swarms of locusts from Rajasthan. There were glimpses of other Dilliwalas, as when the villagers tramped to Kingsway to see the Chhabees Janvari parade, the men carrying their juthis on their head to prevent them getting dusty. And we saw them in their habitat on Sunday afternoons when we adventured out through rural Delhi, past the high walls of Chiragh Dilli, the clean and spacious Sultan Garhi, the fairy-tale fort of Tughlaqabad..past brick kilns, stone quarries, hills and streams and, from high points, the golden expanse of palash, the flame of the forest, later tamed into the Buddha Jayanti Park…At the Jamali-Kamali masjid, the villagers advised us to turn back — dakus ventured out after dusk…Summer evenings drew us to leisurely walks on the Rajpath lawns, buying paper cones of spiced chana.
Enter the DDA
In the early 1960s, standing on the quiet Kalkaji Mandir hill, which overlooked a board saying, “Site for Bahai House of Worship” (which 30 years later sprouted the “Lotus Temple”) I noticed on the horizon some 2-storeyed, white-washed buildings. My father explained that these were homes being constructed by something called the “Delhi Development Authority”. Somehow its monotony depressed me. I was looking at the Ninth Delhi in the making…
DDA’s Delhi was different from Lutyens’. The latter drew on classical Rome, the latter on 1890s American planning norms, particularly the very unsuitable one of ‘zones’ being divided by activities. Nehru Place, meant to be the prototype for ‘district centres’, was depressing by contrast to lively Chandni Chowk or elegant Connaught Place. In the 1970s (having submitted my thesis), I started reading and attending seminars on modern urbanism. It was a heady experience, bringing back memories of The Fountainhead, read in college, and a contrast to the drowsy hours spent in the archives. There was also a sense of eagerness, during interchanges with wise and sensitive individuals like Edgar Ribeiro, Syed Shafi and Mahesh Buch. This unfortunately did not permeate the printed Master Plan, unbelievably shabby and uninspired, like a railway timetable, not a promise of a grand city. In the 2010s, another shocking lacuna was to come to light — the lack of an archives of the DDA and the TCPO. (In the 1980s I had had a similar shock when I found the grand Archaeological Survey’s archives were stuffed in a room like a godown, with a timid mouse as record-creeper).
In such a situation, a person like DDA’s Vice-Chairman, Jagmohan, was able to project himself as a visionary — India’s Baron Haussmann. He had two dreams for Delhi — one, to revive the culture and landscape of Mughal Delhi. His Rebuilding Shahjahanabad was published in 1975 and one of the examiners of my thesis, Barun De, asked me why I did not quote him. I said I thought it presumptuous of anyone to undertake ‘rebuilding’ an organic/imperial city by tacking on suburbs mimicking a historic lifestyle, a version of the Potemkin Villages.
Jagmohan was also enamoured of the modern vertical city. If he had studied Haussmann in depth, he would have appreciated his three achievements — the most visible was a pleasing, at places majestic, townscape, with excellent roads and pavements (the Parisians’ walk that Delhi citizens step into outsize cars), and also, not visible but the most vital, an infrastructure of drains and sewers reminiscent of the Romans. Jagmohan also would have done well to study British municipal planners, and in particular Patrick Geddes. From the late 19th century, British industrial and commercial towns were transformed by excellent public works. In Delhi, one comes across marble plaques celebrating road-widening projects inaugurated by Jagmohan’s lotus hands. What of their afterlife?
When DLF was exiled from Delhi and made Haryana its happy hunting grounds (This was after one of the three members of the Planning Committee disclosed to the DLF which areas were being proposed for ‘urbanisation’, and in a lightning swoop they bought up the villages which later were named Greater Kailash 1 and 2, and Hauz Khas and other areas in west and east Delhi), DDA took its place as a giant landlord. Instead of “rebuilding” Shahjahanabad, the DDA’s achievements in the late 1970s were two — a 23-storey office (from where the Vice-Chairman could look down on the Jama Masjid), which was to set a fashion for monument-mania, and a proliferation of ‘Resettlement Colonies’ (oddly called Jhuggi-Jhompri Colonies) to house the poor, after demolishing their old dilapidated homes from where they could hear the azaan. On Vana Mahotsav Day 1984, our Conservation Society went to Madangir to plant roadside trees, only to find the roads had no pavements! Later in the day, I was in the upper-class area of Anandlok, which also had no pavements — but for a different reason — the houseowners had extended their territories. Something inside me broke at that point…and reminded me of Le Corbusier’s dictum — “A test of an architect is his ability to build the smallest house, not one who builds a lavish one”.
An unequal city
A persistent characteristic of every Delhi has been social hierarchy — from the gradations in the imperial cantonment of the 1850s, the imperial capital of 1911, DDA’s Delhi after 1962 — the hierarchy of A, B and C-type houses, MIG\LIG colonies (incidentally the use of the term ‘colony’ for housing estates is not British, but DDA!), the embarrassing Man/ Shan /Vinay and Seva Nagars, MIG/ LIG/ Janata housing. It was only the outrage of the Vinay Nagar residents that led to them being renamed after “freedom fighters”. The obsession with size and location is Delhi-wide. The inhabitants change, new neighbourhoods emerge, but the stereotypes continue. In the 1980s, Jug Suraiya, who had relocated from Kolkata to Delhi, retailed an anecdote. At a Delhi gathering, someone asked him “Where are you putting up?” He was tempted to retort “Right now I am putting up with you”! Every citizen has not only a sense of his place in the urban fabric, but also how much he can get away with. As part of this, he sees individuals, not institutions. In public discourse, blame/praise is apportioned to political parties, to officials, to institutions. All this makes for a cacophony, but for little measurable action. Reports invariably talk of letters “going unanswered”. In the present crisis, is there a single person standing up, owning responsibility or offering time-bound action?
Some recommendations from a Delhite
Looking back, a century after British New Delhi came into being, I feel the following have happened:
a) Many monumental structures have been built to house democratic and research offices, but maintenance is often abysmal.
b) There has been a great increase in dwelling units.
c) There has been an increase in thoroughfares, but little concern for pedestrians’ rights.
d) There have been plans for more of all these.
e) There has been a vast increase in private and public vehicles.
And there are reasons for alarm. Delhi, like any city, has had crises, brought on by social conflict, natural disasters and inadequate administrative controls.
Today, India’s capital faces an environmental crisis which is being exasperatingly addressed in cliché political terms.
Shifting the capital to another site is no solution. We are not in 1912.
Can anything be done then to salvage this great megapolis?
Obviously, the first step is to rubbish all the mud-slinging and make Parliament dignified. Form a national government, and enlist hydraulic engineers and architectural thinkers to work on a priority plan to address Delhi’s ecological problems.
Second, see what Delhi can shed. For instance, there are plans to demolish the Nehru Stadium and build a sports city in Delhi. There should be no demolition.
Here, I recall Syed Shafi’s suggestion, made over 30 years ago to list all corporate offices based in Delhi, and relocate them, not to other metros but to Tier-B towns not too close to Delhi (recalling the very sensible ring-towns proposal of 1955).
South Africa has three capitals: Cape Town (Legislative), Pretoria (Executive) and Bloemfontein (Judicial). Is there a template for India too in this?
Schools should not present general theses on pollution to children. Rather, they should involve them in data collection. They will transform the city. Likewise with communities and RWAs.
Finally, can Delhi have a rethink about the 5,000 farmhouses that Ford Foundation experts in 1955 smuggled into the Master Plan?
Narayani Gupta is a historian and chronicler of Delhi’s past. Her works include Delhi Between Two Empires (1803-1931). She lives in south Delhi. This article is based on her conversation with Rajat Ghai on a cold December morning, with her pet spitz Teddy snuggled nearby