The problem

Circa 2011 and Delhi has taken on a new avatar, that of a metropolis connected with an elaborate, growing metro system. Over the last century, particularly post-independence, the change has been dramatic, often chaotic and not carefully thought through. Landmarks, names of streets and localities, as well as other elements that patterned the public space giving Delhi its special body and soul, have been tampered with, sometimes removed from where they belong. Layers of history and the sense of belonging, the fragrances of what make life and living worthwhile within the concrete, chrome and glass of what is desperately trying to be a ‘modern’ cityscape are being lost because of interventions made by babus and politicians, who have little understanding of what makes a city tick, what makes its growth organic.

Inexperienced and uninitiated in the fine details of sensible town planning, municipalities have run amok for decades, bringing into play sensibilities that are sterile, soul-less, substandard and with no cultural anchor. Those in charge cloned the worst of the mid-level cities in the West, believing they were the symbols of modern urbanization. They were ‘bureaucrats’, municipal officers led by elected ‘political’ councillors, who have shown scant comprehension of our plural history, our diverse architectural repository, our traditional ‘town and space planning’ – all of which are highly specialized skills that need to be infused into a complex tapestry of a ‘city’ that is the manifestation of an elaborate and extraordinary cultural ethos that has absorbed much from cultures and civilizations from across the planet, over thousands of years.

Post-independence India has failed miserably in this realm. New Delhi, conceived and built by Edwin Lutyens, Herbert Baker and their team, was the last of the carefully designed and well-orchestrated ‘new cities’ of India. Then came Chandigarh, representative of a language and political idiom that was restrictive and far removed from the tactile and human ‘India’. Designed an executed by Corbusier, this reinforced concrete ‘city’ just did not breathe! Then came the rather strange Gurgaon, rising out of the dusty plains of Haryana, recreating yet again an alien and bastardized version of a western sensibility that belonged to another culture and depressing, cold climate. Sheets of glass make sense in cold countries to draw in and attract the heat of the occasional sunshine unlike in India where glass frontages kill the cool for nine months of the year.

We had a great opportunity in the 1950s to create a new architectural vocabulary, a directory of indigenous Indian materials, of living building skills, of horticulture and more. Instead, we became inferior ‘copycats’ of the so-called ‘developed’ world, hopelessly cloning what the administrators of a ‘command economy’ thought was ‘good design’ when, in fact, it totally unaesthetic and un-rooted. Our legacy of fine building traditions was thrown into the dustbin of history by those who rule our public domain, as we proceeded to build substandard and ugly edifices with unthinking abandon. We moved backwards in an attempt to move ahead.

In Delhi, as new colonies mushroomed, a nexus between the builders and the municipalities mandated to enforce the established ‘norms’ became very strong and soon began to bend the law for that ‘little extra space’ leading to huge corruption. You could get anything done for a price. Soon you had to ‘pay’ even if you were within the law! Cities and towns descended into becoming undignified, unlivable habitats. Silly ‘rules’ have killed the soul of our cities and even sillier enforcement has destructed the ethos of urban India.

The mindset of our ‘rulers’ needs urgent overhaul. They must cease to be bad imitators. We need to go back to the drawing board and reinvent ourselves. We need to fuse modernity with tradition and produce the Indian ‘model’, a design for living. We need to draw in expertise from the private sector to partner the well-entrenched and dominant public sector that does little for the public! In India, working and living was in the same space – the shop floor on the ground level and the family living above, sharing in the servicing of the business. It was intrinsically inclusive and the family unit was a collective. When the British built Connaught Place, they too had residential accommodation on the first floor of the great, pillared arcade. Modern, free India, uprooted its own real and tactile norm by endorsing a sterile separation of work and living, thereby compelling a break from the spirit of ‘community’ and ‘identity’, diluting the sense of pride and rootedness. We had begun to ape a middle America ‘new culture’ model, disconnected from a layered civilizational strength. Little surprise that our towns and cities are a mess, a nightmare, because those in charge created alien domains where Indians scurry about doing their chores, having left their soul at home! Civics was thrown to the winds.

We sent our wonderful flower and vegetable mandis that were part of every habitation, every colony, to the edge of town and placed them in prisons of concrete, ugly and filthy. Our municipalities stopped traditional vendors going from house to house selling their wares – the ‘tinning’ expert who kept our utensils and thaalis shining, the kabadiwallah who bought old papers and bottles by weight to recycle, the women who exchanged old torn clothes with new utensils, the fruit and vegetable seller, the iron smith, the knife sharpener, the occasional singer with his one string instrument, acrobats, itinerant minstrels, and more. Now we have uncouth, pot-bellied policemen extracting hafta from these experts, beating them away from the ‘colonies’, killing the soul, skills and expertise of India.

Those who rule us, who determine such ‘policies’, clearly have neither the imagination nor intellectual wherewithal that is imperative when devising strategies and plans for our existing and burgeoning towns and cities. We have created concrete, smelly slums and called them ‘towns and cities’. Every visitor wants to go to the ‘old bazaar’. We have allowed them to rot. We have failed to provide parking facilities; clear skylines (ours have illegal wires criss-crossing the ether); public toilets; benches; pedestrian crossings. Instead of delivering the basics, municipalities have killed the ethos of a great civilization.

Elsewhere in the ‘developed’ world, Sunday markets are encouraged, flower vendors are on every street corner, as are newspaper and magazine kiosks. New York would have a fit if the hot dog vendors were thrown to the outskirts of that great world city. Indian municipalities are peopled with individuals who have no clue about cities, organic cities, the culture of a city and, most importantly, who disregard and disrespect citizens. Minds need to be turned inside out. Government must enforce traditional vending and provide the city infrastructure for the many services. Buying jasmine garlands on street corners is ‘Delhi’ in the summer. It is madness to stop that. Newspaper kiosks should be mandatory at every major street corner or junction and in every single market place. It is impossible to step out and buy a newspaper on the streets in Delhi! Shameful. Nothing was more absurd as removing the flower mandis from the city centres of this capital. They must be brought back.

In deep-seated insecurity and overwhelmed in a veneer of hypocrisy, we removed historical statues from where they belong and left canopies and pedestals empty, but grabbed the grand offices and palatial bungalows! We permitted our rulers to disfigure buildings and homes, to break established ground rules, to mess about freely. We restored Hyderabad House as an official venue for international meetings, and Jaipur House as the Museum of Modern Art, but we mauled Baroda House and constructed illegally all around it to house the head-office of the Northern Railways. Those buildings need to be demolished, the gardens restored and Baroda House restored to being the structure it once was. Thereafter, it could house an extraordinary museum of Indian textiles. The Railway office should shift to Dwarka. It does not need to be in the centre of New Delhi. Public Art, carefully selected by a team of international connoisseurs, should be placed at appropriate points in the city. Local museums should be encouraged. Mobile lending libraries as well as second-hand bookshops should be a must in every bazaar and colony. The list is endless.

Government has to ensure the infrastructure – the parking facilities; the green spaces, the lungs of the city; the garbage collection; the street lighting and cleanliness; the public facilities. Government policy and its many functionaries must stop killing the soul of our cities and our people, and return to the roots. It is time we rewrote the faulty norms and restrictive rules to allow our urban spaces to breathe and grow organically.