A Place Within (18 page)

In 1911, at the Royal Durbar in Delhi, held on the occasion of King George and Queen Mary’s visit, the king announced that the capital of “the Empire” would move from Calcutta to Delhi. Shortly thereafter, Edwin Lutyens was commissioned to plan the new city in collaboration with Herbert Baker. Lutyens, a highly talented architect with connections in high places, had begun his career as a designer of elegant English country houses. Recently, however, he had designed the Johannesburg Art Gallery, with which project he began to think of a Classical architectural style suitable for the overseas possessions of an empire. For one thing, they had to project strength and stability.

Lutyens corresponded regularly with his wife, Lady Emily, and in his lengthy, candid letters we learn much about his attitudes and thoughts concerning the imperial capital he had been commissioned to lay out.

Lutyens arrived in India bearing a certain intellectual hauteur. He was arrogant and imperialistic, always conscious of the superiority of the West. India was the antithesis to his tastes and values, everything about it irked him. “It is all baffling, people and objects,” he wrote. He was appalled at the lack of sanitation (“nil”) and cleanliness. Of Indian architectural accomplishments he was utterly disdainful, and its historical ruins he found bad and lacking dignity.

Architecture—there is practically nil. Veneered joinery in stone, concrete and marble on a gigantic scale there is lots of, but no real architecture and nothing is built to last….

Personally I do not believe there is any real Indian architecture or any great tradition. They are just spurts by various mushroom dynasties…. And then it is essentially the building style of children.

The Qutb Minar was an “uncouth and careless unknowing and unseeing shape.”

How could he then design a city sympathetic with Indian lives and values? That was not his purpose; he had come to build a city that would be a symbol and an administrative centre of the Empire. Ironically, on his home front, Lady Emily had become a devotee of J. Krishnamurti, who according to the theosophists was the Maitreya (the successor of Buddha according to prophecy), causing Lutyens a great deal of unhappiness.

The location of the capital was much debated. The viceroy, Lord Hardinge, flip-flopped between three sites: North Ridge, beyond Old Delhi to the north; Malcha, on the South Ridge, to the far west and south of the old city; and Raisina, adjacent and to the south
of the old city. Finally the last site was picked. Then there was the “Battle of the Rise.” Lutyens preferred the secretariat buildings to be on a gentle rise along the Rajpath (then called the Kingsway) so that the Viceroy’s House (now Rashtrapati Bhavan), to be designed by Lutyens, would be at the top and be visible along the whole way. Baker wanted the secretariat buildings, which he designed, to share the height with the Viceroy’s House, which as a consequence would become blocked part of the way. Baker won and Lutyens was furious. In the matter of style, Lutyens naturally preferred Western Classical; the viceroy wanted Indo-Saracenic. In the end a compromise was achieved.

Between the old Shahjahanabad in the north and the deserted older cities to the south, New Delhi was laid out as a pattern of contiguous and overlapping hexagons and triangles of wide avenues, its central axis the Rajpath, which joins the Rashtrapati Bhavan—by far the grandest building in the new city—to the massive war memorial, called India Gate, beyond which lie the Purana Qila and the excavations of the ancient Indraprastha. The grandeurs of Persepolis, the Acropolis, the pleasure dome of Kubla Khan, and the Mughals—these were the visions in its architects’ minds as they began to conceive their project. They produced a magnificent and beautiful city, but unfortunately more of a showcase capital, a monument to the arrogance of Empire, to demonstrate daily to the native its might and what it represented. It reminded one visitor of a “little Versailles” and another of a more pleasing Nuremberg. It is a city to take a pleasing drive through and admire the legacy of “the Britishers” en route to somewhere else; to come to for a picnic on a holiday at one of its lush green parks and play cards and watch the kids fly balloons and kites; to come to and watch a military parade on Republic Day from its broad sidewalks. But the commercial and the cultural hubs thrive elsewhere.

Twenty thousand Indian labourers were employed in the construction, Lutyens tells us. “The sandstone used was of the same
strata as that used by Akbar and Shah Jahan. The stoneyard was one of the largest in the world, employing over 3500 men, who dressed over 3 1/2 million cubic feet and about 350,000 cubic feet of marble. To the south of the city, 700 million bricks were made out of 27 kilns…. There were 84 miles of electric distribution cables and 130 miles of street lighting. 50 miles of roads and 30 miles of service roads.”

From one of the contractor families that built New Delhi comes Khushwant Singh, the nonagenarian grand old man of the city, author of numerous books, including the classic Partition novel
Train to Pakistan
and a scholarly history of the Sikhs, and essayist par excellence, whose columns speak to millions every week in India and are circulated over the Internet. An institution. Born in a small town in the Punjabi part of what is now Pakistan, he attended Lahore College, the alma mater of a number of eminent men of the subcontinent, before practising law for a brief period in Lahore. He has been a government press attaché, a radio journalist, and editor of a number of newspapers and magazines. I met him briefly at a book party at the end of my first visit. Penguin India had published an edition of my first novel and he had written a very flattering column on it in a newspaper Sunday supplement. He gave me a warm embrace when I was introduced, and then identified the community I must come from, which figured fictitiously in the novel, and which not a single person outside of that community, in India or elsewhere, had been able to do. It was an embarrassing moment, for he was and is a presence much vaunted, and I did not know what to say; my spoken Hindi, too, was abominably halting.

He can get away with saying things sometimes in much the same way a naughty grand-uncle might, to the mild disapproval of the parents. Thus he writes about the “nauseating” habit of nose-
picking, then with relish goes into details of the practice, using as his reference an American book that came his way. He hands out a lesson on sex: “Also, in monogamous marriages, the absence of variety (which is indeed the spice of life when it comes to sex) and monotony deprive both partners of the urge to engage in love-making.” Often there will be the pithy observation on some aspect of Indian culture—the fast of Ramadan, the festival of Diwali, the significance of the river Ganges—a reminder, actually, for mutual understanding and tolerance, in this monolithic-looking nation teeming with differences. India has many holidays, he reminds his readers, because it is not monoreligious like its neighbours. He scorns politicians and journalists, and always decries bigots of any stripe. Politicians are crooked “windbags” and rabble-rousers. For the journalists he has a special term, “crawlers,” because of their craven attitudes towards the politicians. Quoting a poem by the great Allama Iqbal, he chides the imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid for making inflammatory remarks to a crowd of followers on the Janpath, the grand avenue of the capital. To the previous home minister, L. K. Advani, he once said in full public hearing at a book launch, “You are a puritan. You do not drink, you do not smoke, you do not womanize…. Such men are dangerous.” And he was incensed, as he reports to his readers, when “the crawlers” did not even mention his presence at the event, over which he had presided, no less.

He is therefore a humorous, arrogant, and yet modest encyclopedia of Indian life; and an old scold; and his readers, helpless about the state of their country’s politics, love him because they agree, more or less, with what he says. He’s been around, does not need to kowtow, and the list of people he has known is enviable—politicians, writers, film stars. He can tell many a historical anecdote. There is one admittedly titillating account of the time when he was the press officer at the Indian High Commission in London. Pandit Nehru was attending the first Commonwealth Prime
Ministers Conference, and after an embarrassing incident reported in the London papers involving Prime Minister Nehru and Lady Edwina Mountbatten (the two had a relationship, long a subject of gossip and speculation), the high commissioner, Krishna Menon, advised young Khushwant to keep out of the prime minister’s way, which he did. On the day of Nehru’s departure, however, “many London papers carried pictures [of Nehru and Lady Edwina] taken in the cosy basement of the Greek cafe.” Khushwant continues, these many years later,

This time there was no escape. I was summoned to Claridges Hotel. As I entered Panditji’s [Nehru’s] room, he looked me up and down to ask me who I was. I had been with him for an entire week. “Sir, I am your press officer,” I replied. “You have strange notions of publicity,” he said in a withering tone. At the time, it did not occur to him or to me that the only person who could have tipped off the press was Krishna Menon. Menon had a mind like a corkscrew.

In two columns he bewails the Delhiites’ lack of pride in their city’s history, and the politicians’ “strangling” of its heritage.

Twenty years ago you could go from Safdarjang to Mehrauli, from the Qutub Minar to Tuglaqabad and Suraj Kund and get one uninterrupted view of ruins of ancient monuments…. They made a spectacular sight. Today you can’t see any of them because housing colonies have come up around them and the monuments themselves are occupied by squatters. In mosque courtyards buffaloes are tethered, mausoleum walls are marked as wickets for boys playing cricket; where the Sultans of Delhi held court, chaiwalas ply their trade.

The only minus point about the citizens of the capital is that the majority of them have not yet developed a sense of pride for belong
ing to it. Most of them are refugees from Pakistan who have yet to put their roots in Delhi’s soil.

Succinctly put; the kind of detail and honesty only rarely found elsewhere. Admittedly, the country and the city have been looking forward. “It is hard to believe that these acts of vandalism of our historic city took place in the regimes of our two most forward-looking prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.” Here is a man looking back; but he is old. It should not be forgotten, though, that the politicians who have looked back in modern times have been those ardent nationalists who fomented a climate of intolerance and communal violence.

Khushwant Singh, of course, was witness to the partition of India. Of its place in history, he writes,

we Indians and Pakistanis have chosen to forget what we did to each other to gain our freedom. We have no museums, no memorials to commemorate what was undoubtedly one of the greatest tragedies in recorded history. The uprooting of ten million people from their homes, the loss of one million lives, rape and abduction of thousands of women have all been swept under the carpet of oblivion.

And like many others I have met, he affirms, “When we search our souls, we will be forced to admit that little or nothing of the Gandhi legacy remains with us.”

Humorous and arrogant, yes; but also committed, passionate, and sad. He’s seen wars, assassinations, horrific communal violence, and always calls for tolerance, humour his shield. When Indira Gandhi sent the Indian army into the Golden Temple, the holiest site of the Sikhs, Khushwant Singh returned his Padma Bhushan, one of the country’s highest civilian decorations. He has recently received an even higher award.

Late in his life, now, he does not go out much but gives audiences
between certain hours in the evening. He lives in an upscale apartment complex quite close to the Khan Market and within walking distance of the Purana Qila and Humayun’s tomb. I paid him a visit one night in the company of my Indian editor with a bottle of wine, which he accepted with thanks; he was sunk into an armchair, a white kerchief over his head in place of a turban, a shawl around him. The place was as modestly furnished as many Indian homes I’d seen, but not cluttered. Three middle-aged women had come calling, one on either side of him, whinging somewhat. He loves the company of women, and they, his. The third one buttonholed me on a distant sofa and wouldn’t let me go, invited me finally for a drink at the International Centre, which I declined, much annoyed, for I did not get a chance to get close to my host. His visiting hour was up and we had to leave. Since then, I was told discreetly that the lady in question had been banished (for a while) from the great man’s presence. When I went again, two other women were present, and a man, and the meeting was more managed. Ever the raconteur, Khushwant still holds attention. But he is hard of hearing, and it was the women’s higher pitch that more easily reached him. He told us wistfully of a time when he shared a room one night with a Finnish woman and didn’t attempt to make a pass. The next morning the Finnish woman said, Let’s go for a swim, and she did so, in the nude. He wondered now, with a twinkle in his eye, that perhaps his reserve and fear of receiving an indignant slap on the face the previous evening had been unfounded. He had just published a book of Urdu poetry in translation. One of the two women present was a columnist, the other was involved with women victims of the Gujarat violence of 2002. We talked about a recent incident involving the Bangladeshi writer Tasleema Nasreen, who was threatened with beheading by a Muslim member of the state assembly in Hyderabad. He had his one Scotch, didn’t touch the hors d’oeuvres. Then it was time to leave.