MY family followed the normal trajectory of people who had lived in Delhi in the ’30s and ’40s of the last century: they first moved from the old city to Daryaganj, considered more salubrious and still within the city walls of Shahjehanabad. This was an area with new, spacious and airy modern houses built on the remains of the palaces of Indian princes who had pursued the mutiny, demolished in 1858 to teach them and Delhi a final lesson. We see this as vandalism, which it was, but when you compare it with the mass destruction of medieval and renaissance Paris at the same time and for exactly similar reasons – to control and frighten the citizens of the city after the revolt of the commune – it can be seen in its historical context. The city of light that we know today was a virtual creation of Napoleon III and his town planner, Haussmann; in fact, the great boulevards of the city were built to facilitate the use of cannon and artillery against its own citizens. Its aesthetic success stems from unified planning, while Delhi was left to its sad anarchic fate, as it seems to be today.

 

My family then moved to the ‘so called’ Lutyens New Delhi, but they decided so late that we ended up on Ratendon Road (now Amrita Sher Gil Marg), the last planned street of the new town after which there was jungle brush and the ruins of earlier cities where we went rough shooting for partridge and sand grouse. There were even jackals who regularly devoured pet dogs, which apparently they relish, to our great grief! And the next adjacent colony built after Independence, now called Jor Bagh was actually Chor Bagh, as it was notoriously infested by bandits!

We kept though our very strong cultural links with the old city, as we did our house near the Fatehpuri Masjid. This always remained home for me although I personally had never lived there and in fact had even been born in the New Delhi house. The family was constantly going there as if it could not sever the cultural cord which tied us to it until the Partition of India which shattered Delhi life. We celebrated all the festivals there, both Hindu and Muslim together. We attended family occasions, marriages, births and funerals and the annual mushaira where poets presented their year’s work to a hugely appreciative audience.

There seemed to be a lot of toing and froing in that not so distant past. In the winter, the entire larger family moved to our lands on the river Beas, near the town of Qadian in the Punjab. There were so many of us that a small tent town was put up for the children, all of whom were related and who stood in a queue according to age to be kissed by our grandmother every morning. Among the youngest, I was always last and prayed every night for the system to be reversed at least once, but to my great chagrin it never was. In high summer, we all again moved to the hills with its own delights. Smart Dilliwalas went to Mussourie but our traditional families, with the women in heavy purdah, had houses in Solan and Dalhousie which were considered less exciting but well-removed from temptation. Our purdah was so exaggerated that even the garden on Ratendon Road was surrounded by permanent qanat which was also carried by servants to the railway station to be rolled and unrolled as the ladies went from the cars to the train. The move was exciting enough with entire train carriages, called bogeys for some unknown reason, rented from the Railways and where the children were freed from all restraint! There was no air-conditioning in those days, but huge slabs of ice were placed in every carriage at every stop until Kalka which was greeted with joy by all the over-excited children because the train then zigzagged uphill to cooler and cooler climes!

 

Solan was not as anodyne as was hoped and great mysteries and dramatic events were sometimes unveiled to the uninitiated. One story I remembered was considered by my siblings as an invention of a feverish imagination but which was confirmed forty years later by Richard Lannoy, the genial author of The Speaking Tree which I consider one of the best books ever written on India. He also edited the Aphorisms of Thompson which I helped him publish.

In general conversation we happened to talk of tantrism and he mentioned the story of the Raja of Solan who was cured of mortal tuberculosis by a secret but tragic ritual. Thompson, who died young in Benares, had been living in Solan at the palace and recorded the story in his journal. And I had overheard it from whispered confidences by my mother to her sister. She had formed a zenana friendship with the daughter of the Diwan of the Raja of Solan. As a virgin was needed to save the Raja’s life, his loyal Diwan offered her, and she wasted away while he recovered completely. The summer of 1945 in our household was blighted by the pall of mourning caused by this young life snuffed out.

We moved to Mehrauli for the mango season at the beginning of summer. Mehrauli, where I live today, was an ancient township built around the Dargah of Hazrat Bakhtiyar Kaki, the Chishti Sufi master of Delhi’s saint Nizamuddin, and where, within the precincts of the dargah, an empty grave still awaits the body of Bahadur Shah who died in abject exile, buried in Rangoon.

 

Until 1858, the Mughal Imperial family led by its head, Bahadur Shah and the entire court also moved there at the same time, settling in their palaces, all of which have been destroyed, apart from Zafar Mahal, only to be replaced by blocks of flats. Mehrauli was entirely surrounded by the imperial mango groves, planted originally in the late 16th century by Prince Salim who in 1605 became the Emperor Jehangir, with every species of the fruit tree, between the Haus e Shamsi and Andheria Mor, itself named because the orchards were so dense that there was always deep shade beneath the trees. A few venerable specimens still stand, but the rest were cut down only in the last 50 years. There were many privately owned pleasure gardens but astonishingly Bahadur Shah’s own still remains intact though in a parlous state, waiting to be restored as does his encroached palace, Zafar Mahal.

The Mehrauli Archeological Park with 81 monuments including the Qutb Minar has, for some mysterious reason, been partly abandoned. This state of affairs is true for the whole of Delhi where only 60 per cent of the monuments recorded by the Japanese photographic mission of 1953 remain. At least Balban’s Tomb in Mehrauli has been restored enough to save the architecturally important first true arch with a keystone built in India.

 

Delhi, the city, can be compared to Rome for the number of its monuments and ruins, but we seem to have turned our backs on this treasure to obsessively concentrate and lavish scant resources on what can only be called a suburban garden estate, the residential part of Lutyens New Delhi. The monuments of this period indubitably deserve special attention.

I clearly remember as a child going to our house in Mehrauli. There was no limit to the mangoes, in huge iced tubs, which we could eat. But we were only allowed desi chusnis until we were well into adolescence, when we were deemed qualified to taste more refined fare. I now think it might have been an interminable lesson in patience and humility and not just adult meanness! How we yearned for the samar bahisht chaunsas, the langras the Malihabadis, but had to wait years to taste heaven. Which child would wait today?

Many Dilliwalas had houses here cooled by the shade of the trees, the large Shamsi Talao with its shimmering, limpid waters and by the many small streams falling over the jharna or waterfall to water the trees through little channels called meendh. All are long gone except for the Shamsi, which is now a sewer. The family closest to ours was that of the former late President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, whose mother was related to the poet Ghalib and came from a noble Mughal family with established roots in the old city. His three sisters were rare, perhaps unique, members of the old Shurafa families who continued to occupy their haveli in Lal Kuan until their death in the 1980s and their monthly visits to Rashtrapati Bhavan had the same excitement as our adventurous expeditions to Mehrauli!

Entire households moved there once a year and in my childhood, during and after the Second World War, with petrol rationing we went in our own horse-drawn Victorias, the servants and equipment in hired tongas and ikkas in a joyous cavalcade to stop halfway for lunch at the Hauz e Khas, where we were always informed proudly that it had been, until its destruction by Timur Lang ‘Tamerlane’, one of the oldest universities in the world!

It is said that Timur was so impressed by the crafts of India and the magnificence of our city that he took back 400 stone masons and craftsmen to Samarkand. One wonders whether there has been a study on their certain influence on the arts and architecture of Central Asia?

 

Trying to revive memories is not easy, especially with the cataclysmic changes Delhi went through during the tragic Partition of India. That was the moment I was emerging from infancy to childhood and at the same instant our Ganga-Jamni culture was virtually destroyed, leaving only traces which I cherish.

Without being too sentimental, the two images that come to mind are magical, perfumed, hazy happy days and then Paradise Lost. That Ganga-Jamni culture emanating from the Quila e Mualla, the ‘Noble Palace’ or Red Fort had already been dissipated 90 years earlier with the destruction of Delhi and the mass evacuation and murder of its citizens by the English, equalled only by the Mongols. But a certain spirit limped back and re-established itself when the city was allowed to be repopulated a year later. The awfulness of this period is best portrayed by the poet Ghalib in his recently translated rare prose work, Dastanbui.

 

I was eight years old when my brother and I were sent to school in England but as we had lived a completely Indian traditional life with no transitional English education, it was a shock. My maternal grandfather’s theory was that unless we were grounded in our own culture and education, we would be ineducable. Curiously, while at university, I came across the work of Piaget, the ground-breaking child psychologist who utterly reconfirms this theory, advocating the use of the ‘mother tongue’ as the base of education. But grandfather was not hidebound and in Qadian we had German and French tutors for the older children. In fact, at the beginning of the War when the Germans in India were interned, my father organized the great journey which the German teacher, Anita Schpaat, took from Delhi through Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey to freedom in her native land!

So my early education had been Urdu, Farsi, calligraphy and, of course, history, geography, some mathematics and gardening! England was such a shock that my attachment to India became a passion and I never forgot my beloved Delhi. I would pore over city maps to learn its configuration ‘by heart’ and eccentrically chose Indian history and Urdu for both major school leaving certificates – Urdu taught to me by Professor Ralph Russel, and history self-taught from Majumdar and Datta, as there was no one to teach me.

New Delhi has no real centre or heart and the linear move of the upper classes followed by others from the Old City, contributed to a further shattering of social and family ties and the founding of more and gated isolated suburbs aping New Delhi after independence without understanding that the English agenda was exclusion, has further compounded the problem. Bizarrely, one even sees the emergence of an Hinglish speaking class, proud that their children speak no Indian language!

 

The most valiant effort to build a cultural heart for the city has been by the philanthropic Shriram family which had established roots in the old city; eventually unsuccessful because the architecture of the concert hall and other buildings does not suit the presentation of either Indian music, the marvellously preserved passion play of the Ram Lila or Indian classical dance. In fact, music, the first of the Indian arts, is being denatured, not by a lack of informed listeners but by the use of microphones and loudspeakers to broadcast sound to the audience. This should be immediately addressed, as it is a simple architectural problem easily solved by creating acoustically correct spaces. This is necessary because the transition of what is essentially chamber music to mass audiences is harming its very essence.

Delhi needs world class concert halls, art galleries which can receive international travelling exhibitions, specialized museums – the National Museum has in fact enough material for at least ten, for instance, one for Indian textiles which have influenced the world for at least two thousand years. Unfortunately, the unique holdings of the National Museum are lying unseen, stored in Godrej cupboards in the basements.

There is still land in New Delhi. But for how long? It is fast becoming another necropolis following a venerable tradition as every time some luminary dies, his residence becomes a memorial/museum.

There should be a major rethink about land use and a viable Master Plan for the city: I personally would like to see the Old City pedestrianized and residential, rather like Barcelona with its traditional trade and shops. Equally, it would make town planning sense in New Delhi to put all official accommodation in the space released by the demolition of about ten mediocre bungalows. The rest should be green spaces for its citizens as well as a true cultural city centre which would revive the city in a similar way as Gehrys museum has done very successfully for a moribund Bilbao in Spain.

 

Delhi needs a new face in the post independence India, not just pastiches of Mughal or Lutyens architecture. It can be a vibrant city, with monuments and fine public buildings of which its citizens can be proud. It needs a new face because in the past it had a soul and a culture ultimately emanating from the living Red Fort, now moribund. It was elitist but also had very a positive side, Hindu and Muslim treated equally, Ganga-Jamni culture which affected all the social strata: a most elegant and refined Hindustani was spoken by everyone, even the calls of street hawkers were written by poets! Its own cuisine which thankfully survives, poetry on the lips of everyone, common use of perfumes and flowers and common daily use of ayurvedic and unani medicine. I remember ‘banafshan’, readily available but ignored today, for colds and coughs, made from dried violets among many other panaceas and, above all, that common soul and culture which was as Hindu as it was Muslim.