Delhi can't afford to lose a single tree

The very character of the city might change forever. 

A grand old peepal in Netaji Nagar, Delhi. July 2018. (Photo credit: Trisha Gupta)

In the first week of July, soon after Delhi received its first official monsoon rain for 2018, I went for a night walk in Sanjay Van. The air was heavy with moisture, and the light of the full moon came filtered through a sky even hazier than Delhi's usual. The oppressive humidity mattered little as we made our way into the undergrowth, listening for nilgai, watching in horrified fascination as a spider on its giant cobweb gift-wrapped its supper before our eyes. What made the walk such an incredible experience was the feeling that we were within blinking distance of the lights of Vasant Kunj and JNU, and yet very much in the wild. If we had any doubts, as we clambered up onto the 11th century wall of Lalkot, two packs of jackals in the distance began an impromptu howling match.

Sanjay Van forms the core of the South-Central Ridge, a 626-hectare tract that's one of Delhi's remaining chunks of urban forest. That classification can seem confusing, because the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) which controls the area, seems to conflate the cultivated greenery of parks and gardens with forests: over the years, the authorities have even planted several non-native species that are merely ornamental, like succulents, cacti or champa trees. They have cleared spaces around the rocky outcrops, as if to encourage picnics; built a gigantic look-out tower, a machaan for viewing wildlife – and then laid out a lawn around it.

It struck me later that this apparent inability to distinguish between jungle and garden might have a deeper implication. It might, in fact, have a slightly sinister connection to the claim, last made in the State of Forests Report of 2017, that Delhi's forest cover is increasing. “Despite several infrastructural projects and large scale construction taking place in Delhi, the Forest and Tree Cover of Delhi has been increasing on a sustained basis from 22 Sq. Km. (1.48%) in 1993 to 299.77 Sq. Km. (20.22%) in 2015,” the Delhi government's Forest Department states.

But the government pats itself on the back, adding that “The Hon’ble Prime Minister has also complemented Delhi on its rising green cover over the years,” even though the same report makes clear that Delhi has lost about 0.2 sq km of very dense forest and 0.9 sq km of moderately dense forest since 2015. The stated “increase” is an eyewash, a sleight of hand achieved by changing the mode of calculation of forest cover in 1999, such that scrubland, plantations and orchards now count alongside legally notified forest areas as part of forest cover.

***

This is the sort of institutionalised skullduggery in keeping with the horror that the Central government authorised more recently: cutting down thousands of trees in the heart of South Delhi. A Rs 32,835 crore plan for the redevelopment of seven Delhi neighbourhoods -- all some form of “government colony” -- approved by the Centre in July 2016, turned out to have been granted permission to fell over 16,000 full-grown trees.

Each of these neighbourhoods, from Sarojini Nagar to Srinivaspuri, have been traditionally characterised by two-storeyed housing surrounded by generous open spaces and shade-giving trees, even if plot sizes, invariably, are calibrated to match the occupants’ status in government. Going by the 3-D images on the corrugated high walls currently surrounding these areas, this profoundly familiar urban form will soon be a thing of the past.

In Sarojini Nagar, Nauroji Nagar and Netaji Nagar, for instance, a total housing stock of 8,087 government-owned flats will be replaced by 15,510 flats. To finance the cost of construction, the NBCC gets to build and auction 8,00,000 square metres of commercial real estate in these prime central locations. As environmental activists, academics and policy-makers have pointed out, this redevelopment will not just 'densify' these localities, but put a great deal of pressure on civic infrastructure intended for far smaller populations.

It would also alter the character of large parts of Delhi. The citizens’ movement that came into the public eye three weeks earlier as 'Delhi Trees SOS' has brought people together not just to hold placards but to hug trees in Sarojini Nagar. Some have put together skits and musical performances about the role of trees in the city's life and as a bulwark in our losing battle against air pollution. Others have initiated a 'tree census' that they hope might place the state’s claims under scrutiny.

It is true that these -- that we -- protesting South Delhi citizens have a disproportionate voice in the national media and social media, because they are English-speaking and upper-class, and have the privilege of airing their objections to the press because so many of them -- us -- are journalists. Of course we should ideally be fighting to protect trees from thoughtless developers all across the country, not just in what we consider our backyards. (The Goa government, for instance, recently approached the National Green Tribunal for permission to cut 55,000 trees for the construction of a second airport in North Goa: activists allege the real number of threatened trees is 90,000.)

None of this, however, excuses apathy or mockery of the protests currently underway in Delhi. As Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil wrote in their now-classic book Ecology And Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature In Contemporary India, there are structural reasons why bureaucratic regulators and their political masters are bound to fail our forests: “with no rewards for honest performance as custodians, and no punishment for misappropriation of the resource base, the regulators stand only to gain from profligacy – except, occasionally, when a major misdemeanour comes to light and they are exposed to adverse publicity.” Adverse publicity in Delhi has shown results: a Delhi Court bench stayed tree-cutting until July 26, and on July 7, the Delhi government revoked its tree-felling permissions to NBCC.

In Netaji Nagar last Sunday evening, I joined a friend and eight strangers in an ongoing tree census. At the end of a muggy hour and half, having gazed up into and measured the girths of a glorious neem, two shahtoots, two amaltases, a pilkhan, a possible tumri and a massive peepal, I emerged from my chosen census gali to find an even grander peepal standing sentinel over the remarkably peaceful chauraha. The local presswali, who had ironed clothes under it for fifty years, said it was planted by a “panditji” (who also happened to be a Class Four government employee). Stuffed with pictures of Hindu gods, it continues to be worshipped by locals. But it was also hung with green chadars from an adjacent Sufi shrine. That's just one of the 2276 trees we might yet save from the NBCC. It's enough to make anyone a tree-hugger.

Trisha Gupta is an independent writer and critic. She writes a weekly column on Indian cinema for the Mumbai Mirror, and other pieces on films, books, art, photography and the city for other publications. She blogs at Chhotahazri.

Published on the website Brown Paper Bag, 13 July 2018.

The Last Renaissance Man: The Reinvention of Pradip Krishen

Pradip Krishen's fascinating journey from academia to film, from film to forest. And desert. 

From my long profile in the February issue of The Caravan.

Pradip Krishen in his study. (Photograph by Arati Kumar-Rao. See the whole set here.)

IT WAS A LITTLE PAST 5 AM as we drove out from Jaisalmer into the alternately sandy and rocky terrain of the Desert National Park, a 3,162 square-kilometre swathe of the Thar Desert in western Rajasthan. We were heading specifically for a large dune that goes by the evocative name of Gaja Matha—“elephant head”. For the first time in four days, Pradip Krishen reserved the front seat of the Innova for himself. He had to direct the driver, he said, and proceeded to do so silently, with several elegant turns of the wrist. Just as the driver began to enjoy speeding through the smoky pre-dawn darkness, Krishen uttered a gentle but firm injunction: “Thoda haule le lo, chinkara vagairah aa jaate hain” (Take it slow, there might be chinkaras). Reluctantly, the driver decelerated, lulling the other four still-drowsy passengers back into a potential return to slumber. Krishen, though, remained thoroughly awake. Within minutes, he brought us to a stop with a quiet exclamation: “Was that a hedgehog?”

We drove back a few hundred metres. Sure enough, there was a sad, not-very-spiny ball of quills, rolled up in the middle of the road. Krishen and the rest of us got out for a look: Mithva, Krishen’s younger daughter, accompanying her father into the desert for the first time; Arati Kumar-Rao, a freelance photojournalist working with Krishen; Nishikant Jadhav, a retired Indian Forest Service officer whom Krishen affectionately calls his “Tree Guru”; and myself.

“He’ll go to hedgehog heaven,” said Mithva, as tender an animal-lover as her father.

“The great insectivore hunting ground in the sky,” said Krishen.

“The insects are already here,” Kumar-Rao said. 

It was a strangely affecting sight: the thin, sticky trickle of blood, and the insects lining up to devour the creature who would once have devoured them.

Back in the car, Krishen and Kumar-Rao described how long it had taken them to arrive at the Rajasthani name—just the name—for the specific habitat we were driving out to see. The sandy desert is self-mulching: a top layer of dry sand protects a lower layer of wet sand, providing enough moisture for plants to grow and a whole ecosystem to emerge, creating what might be called the “jungle of the desert”. Krishen and Kumar-Rao spent many trips asking local people what they called these sorts of areas with vegetation. They received answers ranging from the banal and slightly baffled—“registan?” (desert?)—to place-names, like Gaja Matha. Between themselves, they had begun to refer to it as the “SBK habitat”, using an acronym derived from the three plant species most commonly found in the sandy Thar: a spidery herb called seenio; bui, or desert cotton; and a large thin-stemmed bush called kheemp. The coinage had almost stuck when a 19th-century reference—James Tod’s two-volume classic Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan—finally gave them the term they were looking for: roee. Suddenly, the word was everywhere they looked. “Yes, going into the roee means going into the jungle,” our Jaisalmer hotel owner affirmed. “Hmm. You never mentioned it when I asked last year,” Krishen said, slightly disgruntled. That persistent trial-and-error approach to research—eclectic reading plus the pursuit of local knowledge, all the while also devising his own ordering system—exemplifies Krishen’s work.

In the Innova headed toward the roee, we grew collectively still, arrested by the grandeur of dawn breaking over the desert. Krishen’s voice interrupted my own reverie. “When you’re shooting a film,” he said, “there’s a moment at dawn that’s ephemeral. And if you have two or three dawn shots, you need to get matching dawns—a cloudy dawn can’t be followed by a clear one. But the classic is what we used to call RFD, Rosy-Fingered Dawn. Which, of course, is from the Odyssey …”

Like all good storytellers, Krishen is adept at using little sparks from his past to illuminate the present. Once at work, however, that leisurely digressiveness is replaced by a sharper focus. On each pre-dawn trip, we walked the dunes for hours, with Krishen, Kumar-Rao and Jadhav stopping to look at—and photograph—not just lizards and birds and gerbils, not just big trees and shrubs, but also the most minuscule grasses. They knelt, they hunched, they lay flat on the ground to examine everything from the roots of a shrub where a lizard had taken up residence, to the fuzz growing on an old cowpat. There was great passion here, an exhilaration and intensity difficult to describe. Yet there was also an immense sense of calm, an immersion in the present that took the form of an unhurried attention to landscape.

Barren expanses, which the locals called thal, were interspersed with the roee—stretches of vegetation that, even to my untrained eye, transformed the desert from a dry nothingness into a world secretly throbbing with life. Krishen was mostly happy for us to tramp along peacefully as he pointed out the flatter plains, or pediments, that are the oldest parts of the desert, and educated me about common plants like the khejri (“this is where you get the sangri from”). But in an instant his voice would drop to a hush, and everyone would suddenly start whispering dramatically: “Egyptian! Egyptian!” A sighting, as it turned out, of a raptor called the Egyptian vulture.

                                                                                     ***

AN UNFAILING SPOTTER OF SPECIES, Pradip Krishen is a bit of a species unto himself. A highly regarded naturalist and ecological gardener, he is the author of Trees of Delhi (2006), one of India’s most popular books on an ecological subject, and he has just published another—an equally exhaustive yet supremely readable guide to the Jungle Trees of Central India. In an earlier life, Krishen was a highly regarded filmmaker. He directed Massey Sahib (1985), In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989) and Electric Moon (1992)—all, to different degrees, cult films for a generation of writers, directors and discerning movie-goers.

After Electric Moon, however, Krishen stopped making films and went into a hibernation of sorts. When he re-emerged into the public eye after a little over a decade, it turned out that he had spent much of that time teaching himself about trees. Almost simultaneously, he had been teaching others: leading walks into Delhi’s wooded tracts, helping protect the heritage environs of the city’s Sunder Nursery from being cloven by a flyover, and trying to create a microhabitat there. Krishen’s explorations extended into Rishikesh, with a “Wildflowers in the Rain” walk at a friend’s resort, and to Pachmarhi, in Madhya Pradesh.

Krishen’s success remains astounding to most people. “He’s an amateur who outdistances the professionals,” said Amita Baviskar, who has, as a sociologist and activist, long engaged with environmental concerns herself. Krishen has also pretty much invented the shape of the profile he now inhabits. As the documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak, who started his career working with Krishen, put it: “How many people do we know who are amateur tree biologists and photographers and writers? Essentially, no one.”

                                                                                     ***

IN APRIL 2013, I travelled with Krishen from Delhi to Jodhpur, where his most recent project has unfolded in the shadow of what might be India’s best-preserved medieval fortress: the 15th-century Mehrangarh fort. In 2005, the Mehrangarh Museum Trust (MMT) invited Krishen to “green” the fort’s surrounding area, then an eroded, rocky wasteland dominated by the invasive Mexican species Prosopis juliflora—the mesquite, or vilayati keekar—also known by the rather appropriate local name of baavlia, “the mad one”. “Maybe [the MMT] had in mind something like a garden,” Krishen told me during one of our several interviews, on the road and in Delhi. What they got instead is an ambitious ecological restoration project on a scale unprecedented in India. Krishen has spent the last seven years trying to return the area to what it might have been like five or six centuries ago, before it was inhabited by people—and before the late 1930s, when Maharaja Umaid Singh of Jodhpur, in a well-intentioned bid to provide the subjects of his desert kingdom with a source of greenery, scattered the seeds of Prosopis juliflora across it from an aeroplane. A year before the MMT invited Krishen to Mehrangarh, the trust, which is headed by Jodhpur’s former maharaja, Gaj Singh, asked him to resuscitate a moat filled with old stone rubble at the 12th-century Nagaur Fort, about 138 kilometres north-east of the city. Based on his own research and the guidance of the late Dr MM Bhandari, a botanical doyen of the Thar desert, Krishen sowed a nursery of plants native to the Nagauri desert. “It just flourished,” he said. 

…

Read the rest of this profile on the Caravan website: here.

Post Facto: Spring Fling, or how to join the Lutyens' Delhi garden party

My  Sunday Guardian column this fortnight:

The Delhi spring, short-lived as it is, brings into focus a feature of the city that seems to melt the heart of even the staunchest Delhi-hater: its flower-filled gardens. Though lovely at most times of year, Delhi's gardens in March are so gloriously green and so riotously colourful that only the stoniest soul can resist them. Of course, these particular urban pleasures — like uninterrupted electricity, or actually paved pavements — are almost exclusively the preserve of the city's most privileged core, the 43 sq km area usually referred to as Lutyens' Delhi.

Its architect Edwin Lutyens built his reputation by designing country homes in the Arts and Crafts style in collaboration with the English writer and designer Gertrude Jekylls, a woman said to have "affected the gardening habits of two generations", and his only urban planning commission before New Delhi was the Central Square of Hampstead Garden Suburb. So it was no surprise that the imperial capital he built was, at the most fundamental level, a garden city.

Seen from an aeroplane, New Delhi is still one of the greenest cities in the world. But most gardens in the British-built imperial capital remain strictly private, their rose beds (or cabbage patches—who knows?) guarded from curious eyes by high brick walls (and from the possibility of any more dangerous depredations by gun-toting security-men). The few gardens open to the public, interestingly, often surround buildings of one sort of another.

There is, for instance, the verdant expanse of lawn that surrounds the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, lined by rows of flaming red salvias and many-coloured dahlias, complete with a bougainvillea-bedecked drive and the occasional peacock. The Teen Murti garden is a classic colonial bungalow garden, its neat flowerbeds, flowering shrubs and tidy rows of potted plants all really meant to set off "the lawn, that sine qua non of any proper English garden", as Eugenia Herbert writes in her recent book Flora's Empire: British Gardens in India. For "[w]ithout a lawn, the "centre of social life", how could one hold garden parties? Or play croquet or badminton or cricket?" As Mrs. Temple Wright's popular Flowers and Gardens in India: A Manual for Beginners urged her readers, even if they couldn't manage a garden, they must "make only a lawn, or grass plot, and this, with cleanly kept soorkee [brick dust] paths, and a few plants in pots, will be sufficient to keep up the degree of harmony you intend between the outside and inside appearance of your abode."

That injunction, of course, is recognisable as the inspiration for what a friend recently referred to as the "CPWD style of gardening", noting that the British had left the same legacy in other colonies, such as South Africa. Capetown, he wrote with all the astonishment of a Dilliwala betrayed, even has a PWD.

Quite different in effect from the "keep off the grass" lawn model is the landscaped space first brought into being as Lady Willingdon Park — now beloved of joggers, dog-walkers, baby-minders and picnickers as Lodi Garden. The avenues of palms that structure our vision of the Lodi tombs are both orderly and grand, but the garden itself — with an emphasis on winding walks, gentle slopes and picturesque perspectives — draws on a mixture of more "natural" styles. Narayani Gupta and Laura Sykes, in their annotations to Percival Spear's Delhi: its Monuments and History, inform us that the garden was "formed in 1936 on the site of the village of Khairpur; the villagers were given other sites, in nearby Kotla Mubarakpur and in Punjab". It was then re-landscaped in the 1950s by a Japanese team, and the greenhouse added by American architect Joseph Stein (who also designed the India International Centre, the Ford Foundation and various other things in that little nook of New Delhi, providing reason for it to be informally and affectionately referred to as 'Steinabad').

The grandest Delhi garden of them all, of course, is the 'Mughal Garden' that is the pride and joy of the Rashtrapati Bhavan (née Viceregal Palace). Lutyens was commissioned to make it by Lady Hardinge, who loved the Mughal gardens of Kashmir, with their stepped terraces, fruit trees and water channels. But she died early into the building process, and Lutyens' eventual design, though it incorporated a 'Purdah' garden with twelve-foot-high walls as well as water channels and fountains, was very much an English take on the 'Mughal'. The most give-away sign of this was the fact that where the water channels intersected in the Mughal garden, there would have been a stone platform with a pavilion, a place where you could sit to catch the breeze and fragrance. In Lutyens' version, the intersection was replaced by a lawn.

At the other end of the spectrum of possible publicness are the small but gloriously in-bloom gardens that make Delhi's interminable roundabouts a pleasure rather than a pain in this season. Non-Lutyensians, invariably lost as they circle past and miss their turns again and again, have something to feast their tired eyes on. Even the Rashtrapati Bhavan gardens are thrown open to the public in February and March. The visiting traveler Freya Stark once wrote of this practice, "It was extraordinary how alive and agreeable it made them. There is no point in having pomp unless there is a crowd to enjoy it." One wishes there were more who thought like her. Delhi's secret gardens might spring to life more often.

 

Pruning at the Roots: a book on British gardens in India

Flora's Empire: British Gardens in India

By Eugenia W. Herbert
Penguin Books India
400pp, Rs. 799

Eugenia W. Herbert’s history of English gardens in India is a vast but well-trimmed account.

The garden is perhaps as universal a symbol of civilization as possible: nature reclaimed from the wilderness, its unruly splendours tamed – or at least re-ordered – by human hands. And yet, as Eugenia Herbert’s book makes clear, the idea of what a garden is differs completely from one culture to another. Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India is an engrossing book, documenting in marvelous detail the British relationship with a landscape that seemed often recalcitrant, sometimes fascinating—but always unfamiliar. The book takes us felicitously across two centuries and a sprawling subcontinent: from 18th-century Madras and Calcutta to 19th-century Bangalore, from the various hill stations of the Raj to the 20th-century garden city of New Delhi. 

Herbert, an Emeritus professor of history at Mount Holyoke College, spent a quarter of a century studying African metallurgy before she switched to colonial Africa. She became interested in gardens about a decade ago “from reading colonial memoirs and advice books for wives going out to Africa”. When a chance to visit India arose, it struck her that Indian colonial gardens might prove interesting, “since Brits had a much longer history in India than in Africa, and in much greater numbers”. But she expected “variations on the theme of nostalgia”, and had no idea “how many other byways would surface.”

Most of the garden enthusiasts Herbert uncovered in the archives were indeed animated by a desire to recreate Englishness in an unfamiliar environment. Maintaining a proper English garden – one that was kept as free as possible of “lurid tropical flowers” and their ‘overpowering’ scent – was a way of establishing and reinforcing difference from the Indian world in which they lived, as well as deriving comfort from the sense of the long-lost and familiar. Edith Cuthell’s 1905 paean to her Lucknow violets is a classic of the emotional colonial writing about gardens that Herbert frequently uncovers: “You cannot think how one treasures out here the quiet little ‘home’ flower… Dear little English flower!”

But as with any neat model, there are all kinds of exceptions and qualifications to be made. First of all, British gardens in India did not remain static across time – they were influenced by changes in gardening fashions in England. The 18th-century garden houses of Madras or Calcutta (or Garden Reach and Barrackpore) were inspired by the British country estate, “with its sweeping park, copses of trees, and water,” while the bungalow “with its gravel paths, shrubs, flower beds and attempts at lawn” was a 19th- century creation.

Second, there were always individual Britishers who enthused over the new kinds of vegetation to be discovered in India. If James Forbes revelled in filling his Jardin a l’Angloise with Indian flowers and creeping vines, Lady Charlotte Canning thrilled more to the sight of the gorgeous foliage and tangled “curtains of great green leaves” in the Nilgiris than to the rose-covered cottages that her compatriots had created in Ooty. “The one cottage in Ooty that met with her approval,” writes Herbert, “was Woodcot… Mrs. Cotton, she noted… knows how to appreciate the things new to her instead of wanting what is not to be had, & her garden & collection of orchids show this.” There was also the polymath William Jones, who arrived in Calcutta as a judge in 1784 and immediately set about learning Sanskrit as well as cultivating his love of botany, bringing the two interests together by identifying his plant specimens by their Sanskrit names. Even those who did not have the dogged counter-intuitiveness of these examples were sometimes able to see the ridiculousness of the endeavour they had been engaged in. As one wife lamented: “We could have had the most marvelous gardens with orchids and all sorts of things, but, no, they must be English flowers.”

Finally, as Herbert concludes, even those colonials intent upon keeping India at bay did not quite succeed. “Like the mulligatawnies and curries that were not quite Indian and not quite English, colonial gardens, too, often ended up as creoles, their mix of familiar and exotic flowers growing under the shade of mangoes and palms and peepals in lieu of the stately elms and oaks of home.”

The reins of public gardens – whether the scientific botanical gardens established in Calcutta or Saharanpur, or the stately ones that emerged from British attempts at restoring’ Mughal gardens (the Taj) or creating imperial displays (Curzon’s Victoria Memorial or Lutyen’s Viceregal Palace) – remained in the hands of men. But a fascinating perspective the book throws up is how often it was the memsahib, not the sahib, who controlled the private garden. As Herbert told us over email, the garden had already become women’s domain in Victorian England, “so this is not surprising”. But it did bring British women into direct contact, and often conflict, with the mali. It probably didn’t help that colonial wisdom ordained that Indians and their knowledge systems counted for nothing. The influential Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, for instance, insisted that “native gardeners” had no real sympathy for flowers and that they must be trained to obey orders “and nothing more”. Linguistic and gender barriers were likely exacerbated by cultural differences, as Herbert says: “even the idea of picking [flowers] and putting them in a vase rather than making puja with them.” Reading this book, one can’t help being frequently accosted by the vision of an alternative history of colonial gardens—in the mali’s words. For however gently and humorously Herbert writes, the perspective of this book is entirely that of the colonial white person. “India was not for the fainthearted,” she writes, seemingly without irony. “...Flowers and people alike wilted after the first freshness of dawn.”           

Mostly, though, Herbert’s research is rich enough to suggest fresh and unsuspected angles even on familiar facts. Her account of Lord Curzon’s obsessive supervision of the Taj garden restoration, for instance, uses his complicated interplay between admiration and superiority as a window into the complexity of empire itself. Gardens may have been the most ephemeral things the British created in India, but the insights they offer are definitely not.

Published in Time Out Delhi.

History's Tracks

An informer on the history of the Old Delhi Railway Station, published in Time Out Delhi, 2009. 

Why was Old Delhi Railway Station built in the heart of Shahjahanabad? Trisha Gupta looks back at Delhi’s rail history.

The building known today as the Old Delhi Railway Station was, when first built, the most powerful symbol of newness that Delhi had yet known. Part of that power lay in the inherent technological marvel of the railway: that iron beast that moved faster and made more noise than anything human beings had ever seen. But the other part of its power lay in its timing – its position as both harbinger and engine of the changes that would transform the city after 1857.

For several months after the British regained control of the city after the Revolt, they had debated whether to keep the city or destroy it completely. There was a suggestion that Jama Masjid be replaced by a cathedral, for example. Even after such drastic plans were abandoned, European troops continued to occupy much of the walled city, Daryaganj and the Palace (the Lal Qila), which was now called the “Fort”. Further, as historian Narayani Gupta lamented in her 1981 study, Delhi Between Two Empires 1803-1901: Society, Government and Urban Growth (Reprinted as part of The Delhi Omnibus; OUP, 2002), the military decision to clear a 500-yard space around the Fort “led to some of the loveliest buildings of the city being destroyed – Kucha Bulaqi Begum, the Haveli Nawab Wazir, the Akbarabadi Masjid, the palaces of the Nawabs of Jhajjar, Ballabgarh, Farrucknagar and Bahadurgarh”.

Alongside this planned urban destruction, however, came a spate of construction at the core of which was the railway. The railway embankment created in the 1860s divided the city in half, cutting right through the central residential areas. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in a fascinating study of the impact of the railways on nineteenth-century life (The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century; University of California Press, 1987), argues that railway stations were, and were perceived to be, a commercialising, disruptive force. Railway stations in European cities were usually built at the periphery of the well-to-do areas, so as not to arouse too much opposition from “respectable” citizens.

Delhi’s history reveals that railway construction in colonial settings worked in a manner analogous to the poorer sections of Western cities. When originally proposed, the railway line was expected to go from north-east to south-west, through the cantonment on the Ridge. The old Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, had been unhappy even with this, wanting it to be built even further north so as to preserve the tranquillity of the city. In the wake of 1857, however, the British were able to put through a proposal for the railway to cut right through the city. When so many had been killed and so many displaced, a few hundred more could be dislodged with impunity.

And so the railway was built along an east-west axis, distorting the concentric structure of Shahjahanabad, but by running between the now-military bastions of Salimgarh and the Fort, providing the British complete assurance of security and military access in case of a rising in the city. As supplements to the railway line, two straight, 100-foot-wide avenues were driven through the most densely populated parts of the walled city: the Queen’s and Hamilton roads (currently, SP Mukherjee Marg and the Grand Trunk Road). Between the military clearances around the Fort and the land cleared for the railway and these roads, writes architectural historian Jyoti Hosagrahar (Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism; Routledge, 2005), the habitable area of the old city had been reduced by a third.

The entry to the city, which had until then been either by river or from Ghaziabad, after crossing the bridge of boats, changed completely. Where travellers until the mid-nineteenth century were greeted by a view of minarets, the post-1870s traveller got off the train and emerged through the Italianate arches of a railway station into a new Victorian-style city centre, including a Town Hall, a Clock Tower and soon after, a Fountain. It was hard to visualise the crowded mohallas that had once stood in their place.

With the railways, too, came a steady tide of commercialisation. Already an established distribution centre for Punjab, Rajasthan and the North West Provinces, by 1877 Delhi was drawing trade away from Amritsar (Narayani Gupta, as above); after the railway line was extended towards the south-west in the 1890s, Delhi became the largest railway junction in India. The rise in wholesale trade had a huge impact on the character of the city. On the one hand, as writer and civil servant Pavan Varma suggests (Mansions at Dusk: The Havelis of Old Delhi; with Sondeep Shankar, Spantech, 1992): “with dwindling or non-existent sources of income, [the remnants of the feudal elite] welcomed developments which allowed them to rent out parts of their havelis to mechanised workshops, or to warehouses”. On the other, acres of land from estates and gardens were earmarked for railways and sold for factories. The railway was thus responsible for the relentless erosion of Shahjahanabad’s residential character.

Culturally, too, the migration of many well-known families to Hyderabad, and the lack of a court, with its patronage of art and literature, created a vacuum. In place of the old Mughal elite, the British built up a new class of loyalists: carefully chosen men from established families who had displayed their support for the British during the Revolt. Many were rich merchants or bankers: Jains and Khatris like Lala Chunna Mal, Sahib Singh, Ramji Das and Mahesh Das. The rise of this new commercial elite in the Delhi of the late-nineteenth century was a reflection of the city’s altered economy: from ten karkhanas in 1885 to 20 cloth mills that employed 20,000 people in 1900 (Narayani Gupta; as above). By 1910, there was no village in Delhi district that was more than 12 miles from a railway station.

Published in Time Out Delhi, Vol 2 Issue 24, Feb 20 - Mar 6, 2009