imperial new delhi imperiled ?

 New Delhi was home to me for more than two decades.  I actually lived, for a few of those years, in what is still known as the DIZ  Area.  Delhi Imperial. Zone.  It is a part of  this zone that is the target of  the rebuilding  the capital  to  house  more of the babus that Delhi is home to.

 What is still left out of the  rebuilding is the  posher area of that  Imperial Zone  . The area that is called Lutyen's Delhi.  The area that houses the rich and the powerful - the big businessmen and the politicians.That is the area that is   protected  with  a vengeance.



Delhi is going to be transformed by these ill-conceived schemes being initiated by ministries and outsourced think tanks. If such schemes are allowed to come up, they will provide builders with a precedent to triple densities in Delhi. At this moment, development activities of builders have abated in Gurgaon because of the recession and acute water crisis. They have now turned their eyes to Delhi and are gnawing at its gates, fully secure in the knowledge that the government will back them, as it did when they overbuilt and dried out Gurgaon’s water supply. What nobody mentions loudly enough is that Delhi is already water starved. The Chief Minister is at her wits’ end trying to cope with the migration of half a million people a year who settle down in Delhi as it continues to dry up.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article3908083.ece?homepage=true

This is an article i wrote for  the India International Centre  journal. not long ago . and its  not too long.
it was a photo essay after all.

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Imperial Delhi: imagined, imaged, iconicized

I

Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens! I am struck by the middle name of the main architect

of Imperial Delhi--the New Delhi that is still known as ‘Lutyens’ Delhi’. Landseer…

the name reminds me of an older seer of Delhi, another architect from the days when

architects were seers--the Vishwakarmas of their times.

Described as the Vishwakarma of the Asuras, Maya is supposed to have designed and

built the first Delhi--the mythical Indraprashtha of the Pandavas. He is said to have

constructed it as a magical city of illusions so demonically perfect that it did not seem

real. Indraprastha may not have actually existed, but its mythical memory still persists.

In our modern minds and cultural memories, it is more than just a myth, or a maya-made

illusion. The ‘reality’ of its mythical existence had, in fact, made Lutyens plan New

Delhi with the most important axes looking east--to the rising sun and Purana Qila (the

supposed site of ‘Indrapasth’--the oldest, Hindu, incarnation of Delhi).

There is another meaning of Lutyens’ middle name that I am tempted to read into.

This one connects to my interest in photography and the ‘photographic seeing’ of

land: sighting /siting land, the lie of the land--as landscape. Land visually re-presented

and represented through the illusionary ‘reality’ of photography that is about power

and its visual projection. It is a power that is underlined by the fact that there are

more photographs in the world than there are bricks. And that we are, today, a world

constructed more by photography in its different avatars than by the bricks of bygone

ages. It is photography and its many avatars that manipulates us mentally and controls us

culturally.

Lutyens saw and built New Delhi as a very visible instrument of Imperialism. The

building of New Delhi was a colonial project about the projection of British power. In

the nineteenth century, photography wielded great power in construction when, as an

anthropological documentation of lesser peoples, it portrayed and perpetuated the idea of

the West’s civilizing mission and the White Man’s Burden.

As the Most Honourable Marquis of Crewe, Secretary of State for India put it:

The Government House should be a building which will stand out conspicuous and

commanding. As one approaches New Delhi the first object to come on view

should be Government House flying the British Flag. The buildings should not be

dominated by the Jumma Masjid and the Fort nor dwarfed by the Ridge.

The visual conspicuousness was necessary to demonstrate ‘the superiority of Western

culture over the Indian’ and to project the ‘power of Western Science, Art and

Civilization’ with an ‘architecture that represented the intellectual progress of those that

are in authority’. This use of architecture would ‘secure British world power and extend

the writ of Whitehall’.

In a similar vein, Herbert Baker, described as the ‘architect of Imperialism’ and the other

architect of New Delhi, declared that the architecture ‘must not be Indian or English or

Roman. But it must be Imperial’. He saw it as a ‘sacred space’ and talked of the buildings

as ‘Temples’. It is interesting to remember that he began his imperial architectural

practices with the building of Pretoria, in Cecil Rhodes’ white South Africa.

Lord Hardinge, the then Viceroy, saw the new capital as the assertion of ‘an unfaltering

determination to maintain British rule in India’. A city built for eternity as a present day

Rome, it was a Male, Militaristic space: a space that could be, and still is, the perfect

backdrop for militaristic displays of power. The decision to move the seat of the Raj

from Calcutta to Delhi had actually been influenced by the ‘seditious spirit’ and the

worsening security situation in a newly divided Bengal.

Set on a hill with a ‘commanding view’ and built to be higher than the Jumma Masjid

(the biggest mosque in India) the building of Imperial New Delhi was about weilding

command over a land and its people. It was about marginalizing the memories of the

Mughals and constructing ‘an Anglo-Indian Rome … one size larger than life’, an eternal

Imperial city which would ‘reflect Rome and be comparable to Constantinople’. An

imperial, monumental scale, an overt opulence and unrestricted visibility were considered

essential to dominating the monuments of India’s earlier empires.

Thus the new landscape was an act of imperial cartography defined by a grand, symbolic

geometry and controlling imperial grids. These grids echoed G. E. Haussmann’s

reconstruction of an imperial Paris and were about creating straight sightlines, which

were not just about picturesque or dominating views, but were also about crowd control

and the clean lines of fire needed to control riots.

The exaggerated linear perspective (which was meant to symbolize Modernity and

Development) echoed the singular panoramic view of a wide-angle lens and successfully

created the monocular illusionism of frontal theatre. The Central Vista was about political

theatre and visibility. It was built to be visible from miles away and designed for the

natives to point to, as the ‘Residence of the Lord Sahib’. Ceremonial and militaristic

spaces were an important element in invoking an imperial identity and creating the

spectacular awe that would lead to the manufacturing of native consent--the consent to

be ruled. It was an obvious attempt to create a receptive and respectful audience for the

political interests of a Raj that was meant to last a thousand years.

It is against the backdrop of this grand illusionism of a colonial past presented as Theatre

and as a Spectacle that I look at the photographic projection of Imperial Delhi and the

hegemonic mapping of the mind that it promotes and perpetuates.

II

Photography, for me, is about the mapping and the creation of a visual grid that divides

the world into small photographic rectangles. Photographs that create a maya-like web

and map the landscapes of our minds even as they echo the illusionary worlds of Imperial

Delhi: a Delhi, the building of which the art historian Ernest Havell had described as the

making of a ‘make-believe capital city’.

It is the make-believe world of New Delhi photographed and visually propagated,

that intrigues me. I want to look at the manner in which its political iconography has

been photographed and archived--how it is now re-presented and reified. Look at the

power politics of this visual archive, which represents/re-presents it as a very exclusive

(and excluding) landscape. Landscapes and their representations in painting and

photographs are now seen as cultural projections of power. And it is the complicity of

the photographic archive of Lutyens’ Delhi in the creation and projection of colonial

power that draws me to look at the photographs that are most used to illustrate the books

on New Delhi and its building. It is a landscape that can be read as a partial and biased

text, as illusionary Imperial Theatre and as a Spectacle that is short changing history by

creating and perpetuating an iconography that was about the projection of colonial power.

I know, as a photographer, that photography is a form of ideology--a way of carefully

selecting, and representing the world to give it a particular and rather partial meaning. As

a photographer, I understand how photographs create and control meanings--especially

when they are parts of an all too partial photo-archive, and a celebratory archive, at that.

The photographic archive of Imperial Delhi barely exists. For an imperial-sized project,

this big and this important, the available photographic material is surprising in its

sparseness. Very few photographs are available and the same ones, from the same, all too

few sources, seem to be doing the publishing rounds.

The photographs from Sardar Teja Singh Malik’s albums, and from the yet to be seen

CPWD ‘archive’, present the building of Delhi through the eyes of the engineers. They

are about its building, its concrete constructions. Some of the CPWD photographs were,

interestingly enough, shot on Ilford’s ‘Empress’ glass plates. The large glass plates

had been ‘tropicalized and hardened’ for Asian climates, and as rare photographs they

are now hard at work building the Delhi Imperial Zone photo archive by perpetuating

the imperial eye for the future. Most of the large glass-plate negatives in the CPWD

Documentation Centre have not yet been printed. No one seems to even know what is

in the wooden boxes that they are stored in. And photographs from other local sources

(besides the families of the builders) seem to have disappeared-- destroyed or sold as

worthless junk.

The photographs that remain in the public domain hardly do justice to size of the project

they document, preserve and project. This underlines the necessity of building proper

photographic archives, and looking critically at what exists, and finding more that should

and probably still does exist.

What is required is the creation of a counter archive, one that is not exclusive and

excluding, one that is a little more questioned, contextualized and reflective of our

post-colonial world. Given the colonial mindset of the early twentieth century, too

much around the building of New Delhi was probably not even photographed, or was

photographed with clear but narrow agendas. The posing of people to demonstrate the

size of the buildings was a hangover from the earlier picturesque Grand Tour tradition.

And it spoke of the power of the colonial photographer over his ‘subject’ and about his

documentary dictates. People could be ordered to stand still; posed and reduced to being

a human measuring device--or ignored altogether.

Photographs are an important part of a range of soft-power hegemonic practices. They

are intimately involved in constructing a worldview that suits a society’s ruling elite.

Photographs work by naturalizing perceptions--through the realism of their ‘natural’

representation. As the ‘Pencil of Nature’, photography is supposed to be an unbiased

projection of nature representing itself--naturally, without a political subtext. But as

representations, they are not reflections of reality. Photographs work by memorializing

what is in them. The buildings they show are monumentalized in our minds as ‘our

heritage’. This heritage is then deemed worthy of preservation and cultural conservation.

The un-photographed, and therefore un-represented, buildings are easier to ignore, easier

to forget, and then easier to tear down.

The available photo archive largely excludes the thousands who laboured to build New

Delhi, brick by brick. The Bagris from Rajasthan and Bandhanis from Punjab laid 700

million bricks, sourced from 22 government kilns for just the Central Vista. At the peak

of construction, there were around 29,000 construction workers, or ‘coolies’ as they were

called. 3,500 stonemasons alone worked in what was then the biggest stone yard in the

world. They produced three million cubic feet of dressed stone at a rate of 2500 cubic

feet a day, but hardly appear in the photographs that exist. The construction ‘coolies’

who make a proud appearance seem to be doing a disappearing trick. They are /have been

disappearing with the march of time.

In one of the photographs from the CPWD archive, a worker seems to be starting the

disappearing act. He moved too fast for the slow shutter speed of the camera. The feet are

all that the shutter freezes. The rest of him is a blur--a white out. A few workers did make

a brief appearance in an earlier book but they are disappearing in later, glossier, coffee

table presentations of our colonial past. They are literally being glossed over.

In Indian Summer published in 1981, the photographs of the construction workers are,

interestingly enough, credited to a woman--a Marjorie Cartwright Shoosmith, probably

the wife of Lutyens’ representative in Delhi, Arthur Shoosmith. The photographs of a

contractor called Seth Haroun Rashid and a small worker’s child, which appear in Chief

Engineer Sardar Bahadur Teja Singh Malik’s old album were, most likely, photographed

by her. The gaze here is decidedly different. More ‘female’ this gaze, unlike the other

photographs in Malik’s albums and the CPWD files, is not so technical and ‘male’. The

workers in the CPWD photographs are generally placed in the background. But then, the

photographs are about a male engineering world and seem more interested in showing,

for example, stress tests being carried out by the sola-topeed engineers--who are, of

course, fore-grounded.

Sadly, the most regularly published images doing the rounds are from this male

representation of an elite male landscape. It is a representation that excludes the reality

of the labour force that included women and children, as the payment details show.

The men were paid 1/2 a rupee, the women six annas, and the boys four annas. From

the photographs in Lutyens’ own albums to the Imperial Delhi coffee table book co-

published by an Indian publisher as recently as 2002, it is these few photographs that are

regularly repeated. Yet what disturbs me is that it is not just the images that are repeated,

but the viewpoint and the mindset that goes along with them.

The long shots employed, which show the scale of the construction and the more top-

down views that show the layout, are literally about looking down upon the land and

its people. These dominating views are the ones which are preserved and reused. They

are photographs that present and represent Imperial Delhi as ‘our Heritage’. Thus, they

indoctrinate us by working on the internal landscapes of our minds. Their viewpoints,

their mindsets and their meanings in our post-colonial world need to be understood and

contested. It is important to understand how photographs are produced and how they

function in our society.

The larger DIZ area (the area’s postal address is still ‘DIZ Area’), a rarely photographed

government ghetto for lesser mortals, is being destroyed and rebuilt even as New Delhi

seems to become more partial to its imperial past. The Delhi Imperial Zone has been

designated as the only area where rebuilding has been prohibited. In reality, though, that

seems to apply only to the more exclusive ‘Lutyens’ Bungalow Zone’--the residential

reserve of the elite, then and now. (Lutyens called it the ‘bungle oh zone’ and was not the

designer of the bungalows that are sought to be preserved in his name.)

The white ‘bungalow zone’ that is marked for conservation and preservation was built

for the colonial elite. It is this that the modern elite, who have replaced them, seem more

interested in preserving and protecting. Their inherited turf was imperial and exclusive

then. Today, it seems to have become even more exclusive and excluding.

The low walls around the old white bungalows are higher, extended and topped with

barbed or razor wire. The old wooden gates are now barricades guarded by armed

sentries, some of whom even man sandbagged machine gun posts. Guns have, in

fact, become a status symbol for the elected elite. They underline separateness and

successfully enforce a division that, in the Raj days, had been a matter of internalized

custom. The ‘awe’ factor in the very design of New Delhi was supposed to ensure the

acceptance of the Raj’s racial divisions.

Lutyens’ opinion of Indians had meant a strict segregation. He wrote to his wife, the

daughter of a former Viceroy Lord Lytton:

The very low intellects of the natives spoil much and it is not possible for the

Indian and white to mix freely and naturally. They are very, very different and

even my ultra-wide sympathy with them cannot admit them on the same plane as

myself.

The building of imperial Delhi had reinforced racial and rank divides. The buildings

themselves had a strict hierarchy of plot size and building types. The new imperial city

was twice the size of the older, indigenous city, but had only 640 residential units while

Old Delhi housed 250,000 people. The buildings for the English elite were even overseen

by an English Chief Engineer and it was an Indian Executive Engineer, Rai Bahadur Teja

Ram who looked after the building of the native quarters--especially in the older Civil

Lines area.

Indians and Europeans, civil and domestic servants, were quartered separately and

differently. Even the Indian rajahs and nobles were placed at a greater distance from

Government House than the Europeans. The idea of building the residences of the Indian

royalty along the Kingsway had actually come under fire from the Viceroy as Lord

Hardinge did not want to mix with the hangers-on of the Indian princes.

The awe-inspiring hierarchy that was built into the very design of the city is still enforced

through security regulations and through conservation and preservation programmes.

These are more about protection of expensive properties and a new projection of power,

a projection that photography is definitely a party to, and not just in the way it projects

the imperial past. Photographic access to the day’s top politicians is tightly controlled

and has become a matter of controlled photo opportunities: little lilas enacted for a daily,

camera-mediated darshan of Delhi’s demigods, photo-made politicians.

III

The invention of photography was supposed to be the beginning of a democratic form

of representation. But most photography today seems to be about celebrating Delhi’s

imperial identity. The vision from the Central Vista, the old imperial government house,

is almost an aerial one. It presents a city view from the top--as it was planned and laid

out. But, as with every text, this view, too, can have other readings. Even the exclusion of

spaces can be reclaimed by readers and readings from the street.

The political protesters and their tents may have been shifted out from the Boat Club

lawns in front of the grand Vista. (They have been safely banished, beyond a controlling

Parliament Street Police Station to Jantar Mantar.) Yet the desire to be part of the

Kingsway—today’s Rajpath--and the India Gate landscape remains. Photographers and

photographs help people assert their presence, claiming their space on Rajpath, at least

symbolically--if only visually. And in these, their own photographs, they are not figures

used to give buildings a sense of scale. They do not pose stiffly in front of monumental

architecture or inhabit just the background. They pose, but with poise and an assured

sense of self and with a feeling that they belong in this space. They are creating their own

narratives, fulfilling their fantasies and setting up their own stories-- in collaged, pictorial

spaces, if necessary.

Photographs define pasts. They control the meanings of the pasts they visualize and

construct. They can also easily foreclose ‘other’ futures if they are not contested-

politically and culturally re-contextualised. What is required is a bigger and more

accessible Delhi archive, but more important is the creation of a counter archive of

photographs that are not just images, but a re-reading and re-contextualizing of the

photographed past in ways that are not just a continued colonial celebration or a neo-

colonial re-appropriation of imperial roles and imagery.