The eighth city

At a recent conference on Delhi, several speakers complained that the Capital was a lifeless city, a city of dead monuments, a city of babus...

At a recent conference on Delhi, several speakers complained that the Capital was a lifeless city, a city of dead monuments, a city of babus and banias, a city where one could never feel at home even after 20 years of residence. Unlike Calcutta, which is united by common frenzies, and Bombay by celluloid dreams, Delhi’s denizens are disunited in almost everything. But as Jonathan Raban writes in Soft Cities, all cities are plastic, made and remade to fit the imprint of every individual.

Surely it is not the monuments that alienate people. After all, they are mostly ignored, except by those who use the walls to hone their writing skills. For every Pinky that is loved in this city, some Babu has scaled the highest dome of blazon his passion. Delhi’s tombs and tanks, its baolis and battlements are also home to more subtle desires. When we were young, remorseless and uneducated and read only Enid Blyton, my sister and I would sneak around the Safdar-jung tomb and jump out from behindbushes to scare whispering lovers. Youths without homes to hug in, with censorious families looking over their shoulders — were it not for these monuments, where would they go?

But more than lovers, every monument houses at least a couple of dozen Tendulkar wannabes. In the concrete jungles that soil the cityscape, the slums without air and water, these ancient tombs often offer the only green space, and even those are rapidly being encroached upon by buildings. Groups of boys occupy different patches of the park the older ones to one side wickedly hitting their sixes and fours, and the young ones to another, with stones for wickets. But it is not just a function of age. In one Nizamuddin tomb, the boys playing on the left side were from the slum to the left, and the ones in front, from the posh houses nearby. They faithfully reflected the socio-spatial map of the city. (But where do the girls go? It is an open secret that this city has no space for them).

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Behind R.K. Puram is Wazirabad ka Gumbad — atomb with an old tree outside, a baoli whose water has been completely grassed over, and the tantalising remnants of a wall. There is not even a board to describe it, and perhaps ten years om even these fragments will have been swallowed up by the nascent gurdwara next door, the school behind, and the ubiquitous red-washed mandirs. When our heritage disappears it will not affect the jetsetting lot who happily cough up sterling to see squat and ugly Buckingham Palace. Perhaps those who will suffer the most are the lovers and the cricketers; the little Sonus and Monus of this city whose evenings out consist of ice-cream at India Gate or a boat ride at the Old Fort. As V.S. Naipaul said in a recent interview, “poor countries need fine buildings”.

The government has recently experimented by giving Humayun’s tomb over to the Oberoi Group to manage. But what about other forms of joint heritage management, akin to the wave of joint forest management that is sweeping the country? If the ASI cannot bebothered to preserve anything, why can’t it involve groups of citizens who would be willing to invest their time and money in performing at least the bare essentials? Of course, conservation must be carried out by experts in the interest of the public at large rather than specific groups, but surely there is room for public initiative.

If we want to bring this city to life again, we need to reclaim it from the politicians and their carefully cordoned-off security zones. To demand the right to public transport, the right for workers to live and work without being used as scapegoats for pollution, the right for those who build jhuggis the Bihari or Rajasthani way to live in as much security as those who choose Punjabi baroque or Sindhi gothic. And the right to protect our heritage and have it conserved, to enjoy the beauty of these seven cities of the past, so that we can each make the eighth one truly our own.