INDIA is a contemporary civilization which could revitalize and showcase centuries of diverse cultures that have, over the ages, merged and meshed with the soul and sensibility of its citizens. We Indians are privileged to represent it , in its totality – its many hues and textures, its forms and icons, its endless contradictions – that all come together and manifest in the tangibles and intangibles that surround us in our habitats. The treasure that is India is immense and well entrenched.

Despite this inherent strength, post-1947 India has mismanaged, through many alien impositions of regulations and carelessly thought through norms and rules, the fragile and special domains within which we all live our complex lives. But before I elaborate the interventions that could, with relative ease, make citizens an inclusive element in the historical and cultural legacies that we have inherited, I would like to describe how other countries have made their heritage sites into lively living spaces, conserved and respected, in a contemporary, changing and fluid world – living histories comfortable in a new age, as opposed to what is happening in India where decaying cultures are struggling to survive and reinvent their space in an inaccessible ‘modernized’ world.

If you wander into Avignon in the south of France, you will see how sensibly the administration and the residents of the town respect their cultural and social heritage. I recall spending a few days there, years ago, when the Festival of India had taken over the city centre using a range of public and interior spaces to exhibit the living energy of Indian music, dance, and art. Concerts were performed through the night. In a cloister courtyard the quawaals sang into the early hours of the morning; in another public space Kumar Gandharva sang nirguna bhajans under a changing night sky; an art exhibition in an old church contrasted the forms and colours on contemporary canvasses that hung on its walls, with high and dramatic vaulted ceilings; there were post-theatre suppers every evening in family run restaurants that when full, spilled onto the pavement with tables set under a tree or alongside a flowering rose bush; the cobbled streets, free of vehicular traffic, led to the town square where a daily open market selling fresh produce and a wide variety of flora that exuded a symphony of fragrances; shops and boutiques remained open till midnight doing brisk and happy business; cafes were full of talk and laughter with the aroma of fresh coffee enveloping all. The public space was alive as it honoured the cultural treasures of another country, saluting India with a rendition of the Mahabharata written by Jean-Claude Carrière and directed by the legendary Peter Brook, peopled with a cast of characters from across the globe encompassing many cultures, much like India herself.

Where in India could such an event happen? A mere mention would attract a gang of babus waving all manner of government regulations in the face of those representing the true stakeholders of our nation state. All attempts would be made to stall and preferably stop the regeneration and reinvention of all that belongs to us as heritage, tradition and legacy. I once tried to convince the central government and its endless octopus-like tentacles that are adept at sending hapless entrepreneurs scurrying from one department to another, all of them passing the buck, not taking the responsibility of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’, to do something similar in Delhi to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the newest capital, New Delhi. From the moment I opened my mouth to describe the idea, I was stalled with many humungous and incomprehensible hurdles and non-stop, ridiculous questions. The parallel mind waves, one of the creative and proud Indian, and the other of the boxed-in mindset of the typical bureaucrat and his archaic rule book, never converge, and this has made the Indian city space a sterile and unfriendly domain that is unattended, unkempt, disrespected and disconnected for an alive but latent culture, ethos and much more.

 

My suggestion was simple and inclusive for the citizens of this city. The idea was to have one main street identified in each of the seven constituency areas of Delhi. These would be pedestrianized for 36 to 48 hours and each would be historically themed. Activities on the street would range from street food stalls, kabab and chaat, kulfi and jalebis, burgers and pizzas, to craft spaces selling the skills of India, to dastaangois telling their tales of the past and stories of today at chai shops, to large projection screens showing great visuals of the past and the present as well as clips of nostalgia from Bollywood, to strolling minstrels singing and playing their music, to acrobats and jugglers, magicians and fortune-tellers, spice merchants selling their natural produce and firework sellers, laced with cockfights and kite flying, evening kirtans, choirs, quawaalis, bhajans and more …seven recreations of the famed bazaars of this land with all the energy and camaraderie of life on the street. Delhi could have celebrated the community of Dilli and its substantive diversity.

 

This simple and happy plan was scuttled by a sad and frustrated breed of babus who think they know best, a breed that pulls out the silly ‘rule book’, archaic, musty and alien, that determines what can be permitted in our public space. Sadly, they stall change, maim the development of a new idea and by doing so, disrespect the citizen as well as the cityspace that belongs to the public at large. Licenses to cook food; to vend; to electrify; to clear traffic; to keep businesses open beyond the stipulated hour; to have to comply with this, that and the other, makes no sense at all for a grand Indian mela. Yet, all this is stubbornly demanded by the presiding authority to deny us our cultural rights. Legal frameworks have not been created anew to help make our cityspaces inclusive and user friendly.

We ape the worst of the West with much aplomb but never attempt to imitate what they do well, that which would enhance the best of what we have to offer. Instead of tactile development and the introduction of an infrastructure that supports traditional cultural venues in the cityspace, Delhi recently banned makeshift morning flower markets from the centre of New Delhi and flung the vendors to the outskirts, killing the joy of buying flowers in neighbourhood open bazaars. In every western city, makeshift markets selling fresh organic produce and flowers set up their stalls in a village or town square, early in the morning, do brisk business and pack up by noon. We are encouraged to fight buying the traditional organic produce because of absurd, inexplicable regulations.

Our neighbourhood chowks, that were till recently, vibrant community hubs, citizen protected and familiar spaces, are being compelled to become sterile and frigid, with a ban on the traditional makeshift temporary bazaars and roadside services, where the important activity of buying and selling and domestic assistance no longer happens and where ‘neighbours’ too, as a result of this enforced sterility, are becoming increasingly indifferent to one another. The ban on itinerant vending and on the movement of traditional hawkers through residential colonies, like the chatai and chik maker, the kalai wala, the ironing man, the jaripuranwala, the women who would exchange utensils for old clothes, and more, has successfully killed the soul of our towns and cities in the name of ‘modernization’ – a new reality that is, in fact, destructing the real, true ethos of India. Progressive western and eastern countries are doing today what we in India did traditionally and which has always been second nature to us but sadly been snatched away by unthinking and insensitive babudom.

 

In the vast area of architectural conservation, in the preservation and reuse of heritage sites and zones, we have failed to do what has been traditionally intrinsic to our DNA. Our towns were built within a snug, community grid that connected people and homesteads with the bazaars and commercial centres. More often than not, working and living was ‘together’, with the commercial or work floor at street level and the home above. This allowed for the family to be involved in the business and work as a small collective to ensure continuity. The galis and maze of narrow, intersecting roads that wound their way through the inner spaces of the city were meant for walking and when they met the main artery the road broadened and other vehicular traffic plied. There was a science to planning and the proximity that came with the narrow ‘galis’ enhanced the feeling of community in the architectural space. Even in a city that was planned on a symmetrical grid, Jai Singh II when designing Jaipur, incorporated many humane elements taken from traditional city planning that made sense within our cultural frame. Time-tested structures were strengthened with well thought out contemporary idioms and interventions. Nothing was arbitrary. There was always a clear and definite reason for appending the ‘new’ to the ‘legacy’. Those were the historical layers that a majority of our cities were privileged to house, and which we must nurture carefully as we add a fresh skin to the ‘body’.

 

The many modern day agencies, authorities and departments that govern our ‘spaces’ have consciously alienated the material, tangible space from the tactile, intangible soul. They have superimposed frigid and impersonal regulations that separate the two ingredients that define ‘culture’. It is that culture which excites the latent pride and confidence that rests within us all. It binds society and generates a sense of dignity, inclusiveness, unity in that diversity and integrity of purpose. In a rapidly changing world and a shrinking globe where ideas are shared through finely engineered tools of communication, the strength of India lies in her rooted cultures that have, over centuries, absorbed, discarded and withstood influences, cultural tsunamis and brutal onslaughts at all socio-economic and political levels. To have the resilient structures destructed by unthinking and careless management of the shared public domains, is unwarranted.

Multidisciplinary professionals from the community must participate in setting the parameters that will govern our habitats. Only then will India restore pride in her person and confidence in herself. Upon that inclusive ‘base’, economic growth and development will be comfortable as it assists and eases the pulls, choices and pressures of life and living in a new mysterious millennium.

Each of the 543 parliamentary constituencies that this nation has been divided into, should have a basic blueprint that is crafted by experts and professionals representing a range of disciplines and specializations and not designed solely by government bureaucrats. Within those ‘maps’, the idea of India, the land, our inheritance, the material heritage, the skills, philosophies and faiths, the rituals and living patterns, the aspirations for an infrastructure that is inclusive, efficient and with all the contemporary mechanisms that make for a buoyant and creative, liberal and free, civil society where the ‘stakeholders’ come first, must be constructed to absorb the additions sensibly and without painful contractions. Only a working partnership of those who govern, and the citizen, can deliver living public spaces that will shelter, nurture and grow the vibrancy and energy of a modernizing and transforming India.

 

The definition of ‘culture’ is a balanced combination of human skills, architectural spaces and the natural environment. These must be the three stambhs of any and all ‘development’ and ‘growth’ with the fourth pillar being the authority that governs that mix. With confidence and pride in place, corruption free enterprise will flourish and create wealth through traditional skills being brought into play along with the large infrastructural projects. All lines must converge somewhere, sometime, in nation building and that can happen only when citizens feel comfortable in their skin and space, protected and confident in the public, collective domain.

 

If in every individual panchayat, the sarpanch were to allocate a few acres of land to grow a ‘sacred grove’ for all the people under the panchayat’s jurisdiction, India would have added substantively to her green cover. All the children of the area could be given the responsibility to plant and nurture a tree each, indigenous to the area, to create the grove where silence, for thought and medication, for quiet and contemplation, could preserve the sanctity of that space, without any discrimination based on caste, creed or faith. If every panchayat in India were to adopt one historic edifice, pond or lake, and conserve it as a cultural symbol of the area; regenerate one local skill; and authorize a citizen committee, headed by a woman, to protect the natural space around the village, India would have spawned a cultural conservation revolution. It is simple to execute. It would empower women, who are the repository of culture, and who pass the baton to the next generation by embedding in their children the values, ethos and spirit of their larger environment. Easy to administer if there is a will.

In this new millennium, and before it is too late , we must work to reconstruct a fresh, open and inclusive pattern for life and living within parameters that conserve the spirit of community and a shared pride as legatees of a plural cultural fabric with its range of symbols, motifs and manifestations of the greater ethos through colour, form and texture, and made it priority number one in urban planning. It is imperative for India to relook at where it all went wrong and how a prevailing set of rigid attitudes and irrational, uncomfortable procedures and regulations, has facilitated a rapid alienation of the people from their inherited space and domain.