Sunday, November 17, 2024

Looking back at — and beyond — The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad


 Looking back at — and beyond — The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad

Text of the talk delivered at CEPT, Ahmedabad, 

21 September 2024


https://images.app.goo.gl/niPzM9MYhJw7TNZB7


Reading, writing, researching — how do they enrich and extend our understanding? And how does this in turn influence conceptions of time and space and ideas of design? This is what I’m going to talk about briefly, and I’ll explain this primarily through the example of architecture. I’ll begin with quoting something I have written earlier about the value of reading:

‘Reading prods, informs, inspires. Ultimately, it provokes thought. So, it is important for everybody, not just designers. But, it is especially important for designers…it not only feeds the imagination but also equips one to visualise personal images of other people’s experiences and buildings. Since, invariably, architects (unless they are enormously rich) have to design for other people than themselves, reading gives one empathy for other people’s needs and views, and also enriches one’s imagination by being able to summon up appropriate images that can be translated into specific designs for those people. Secondly, it helps to communicate better, which is equally important since design is as much about understanding the client’s requirements and translating it into a workable satisfying solution, as it is about communicating that design to the client.’


Reading thus allows you to observe a variety of contexts and characters. In a sense it allows you to inhabit different worlds — and not limit yourself to only your direct experience. Apart from imagination and empathy, it therefore helps to sharpen observation and perception — two other attributes which I believe are important both for design, and for research. Indeed, for any profession, since finally we are all trying to make sense of the world as best we can.


What about writing?

‘Just as the process of making drawings is a way of clarifying the design as an architect proceeds in evolving it, similarly the process of writing is a way of clarifying one’s thoughts and giving them a structure and physical shape. Finally, it is only when you are clear about what you think, that you can clearly state this to others. So, writing is an essential part of clarifying and communicating to oneself—and to others. When we write, it is first of all, a dialogue with ourselves that we initiate. So, our thoughts, instead of being half-formed ideas that flit in and out, take tangible form. We commit ourselves on paper, as it were, and literally see ‘what’ and ‘how’ we think.

A good piece of writing, like a good piece of architecture, needs to have a satisfying base, a discernible middle and a well-knit conclusion. Both require intuitive as well as analytical practice.’


And what about Research

The origin of the word Re-search is ascribed to late 16th century French from re- (expressing intensive force) + cerchier ‘to search’. It is defined as ‘the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions.’ The driving force of research is to question. The connection between research and the acts of reading and writing, is part of a systematic intensive search to reach appropriate conclusions and logical answers to those questions and to reach out to others. 'Writing enables one to ‘speak’ to a greater number of people than those in the immediate vicinity, and reading allows you to ‘listen’ to a greater number of voices than those in your immediate neighbourhood, or even in your own lifetime.’ 


Looking back at The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad 

As far as my own trajectory is concerned, reading and writing have preceded active formal research. Subsequently, the process of research, has involved not just a lot of reading and writing, but also how I look at design and ways of living. I have to clarify here that I read not just specific sources on my subjects of research, but also a lot of other stuff, especially fiction and books on science, ecology, and economics. I find this helps me in understanding different contexts — historical or contemporary — as well as helping me to convey these learnings in my own writing.


How does my research specifically on the Red Fort of Shahjahanabad bear this out? For this, I’ll go back to my first visit to the Fort — which was when I was in my third year of Architectural School. What I recollect most vividly is my sense of perplexity. I could not understand how the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, or for that matter anybody, would have lived within the Fort. What I saw on site did not seem to add up to any coherent plan. Though I could — just like anyone else who visits it — experience the proportions, volumes, and forms of its buildings; their elegance, delicacy and craftsmanship; the light and space within them; I could not decipher it as a place that could accommodate the functions of life.


That led me to search for explanations on the Fort and Mughal architecture, and I found that no one had addressed this at all. They had only written about, or commented on, or researched on specific, separate portions of the Fort or just in terms of architectural styles. But no one had asked this question — how was the Fort lived in? When I tried to find the answers myself, I discovered that 1) there was very little portion of the original planned form of the Fort that still existed on site. And 2) that there were very few records of this original plan of the Fort. Since my primary sources — the architecture on site — were so little in amount and what remained of them had changed so much, and since the secondary sources too, were very few and fragmentary, often contradictory, and were scattered all over the world, there were many missing blanks in the story of the Fort. I have written about this extreme challenge in researching the Fort in the very first chapter of my book, as well as in later chapters. 


So it was not surprising that I had been so perplexed on my first visit. What was more surprising was, that there was no information at the Fort to tell visitors this fact that what they see today is so incomplete, and that this was so because the British destroyed more than 90% of it after 1857. What I also discovered, as I continued to study the Fort, was that the way of life within it was very different from the way we live today. So much so that even if the missing parts of the Fort still existed, we would not be able to make sense of it. So, these attributes that I mentioned: observation, perception, imagination and empathy, had a big role to play in helping me visualise and reconstruct in my mind — and finally in my writing — what were the original spaces, forms and functions of the Fort. 


I would also like to underline that it was familiarity with the primary record of its architecture, incomplete as it was — through close scrutiny of not just its explicit forms, but of the entire canvas of the implicit systems within it, which furnished me with clues about how to excavate its memories. By undertaking a variety of geometrical, spatial and proportional studies, and accessing very diverse sources — court-histories, miniature paintings, accounts of flora, fauna, food-habits, festivals, drawings, maps, diaries, letters, local proverbs, government orders, archival panoramas — I could uncover a relationship between the architectural traces that remained, and fill in the gaps in the sequence of extant Mughal structures, to recover the likely location of missing buildings.


Looking beyond The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad

The book contains enough detail about my discovery and interpretation of the original attributes of the Fort. So what I am going to speak about is how the process of research and writing has helped me — not just to understand the Fort, which was my objective — but beyond that. It has led me to critically analyse design processes today, both my own and those I see around. It has guided me in devising methodologies to analyse architecture, regardless of whether it is labelled historic or otherwise. It has made comprehensible essential themes in the design of the Red Fort and its city of Shahjahanabad — which are not apparent today on the surface — as well as the biases which condition our cities today. It is these last two aspects that I will enlarge upon. 

As I now see them, 3 main themes as design objectives underly the visual representations and written descriptions of the Fort and city.

  1. Permeability 
  2. Energy 
  3. Equity

Let me explain how. Permeability in the sense of both spatial permeability and social permeability, is manifest: 

  1. In the very choice of the main building elements used in the Fort and city: such as colonnades, jalis, pavilions, gardens, forecourts, verandahs, chattris; 
  2. In the very siting of the Fort and city — in their overall location, as well as in the location of different functions within them;
  3. In the very configuration of these building elements within their locations on site, in the relationship and juxtapositioning of built and open space, and how they are surrounded by and connected to each other. 
  4. And finally in how this choice, siting, and configuration of building elements and functions, grants opportunities for mingling of sensory experiences of sounds, scents, sights that flow between them, and for different sections of society to come together.


This pattern of a fluid building typology, composed of sequences of walled courtyards-verandahs-halls-pavilions: has been tried and tested in the Indian subcontinent from Harappan times, and some of its finest examples are visible within the Red Fort. As for Shahjahanabad, large havelis — around which smaller habitations clustered — were located throughout its different precincts. Architecturally, these havelis echoed on a smaller scale the pattern of buildings within the Fort: set around and within fountain-courts or gardens of orange, pomegranate, and other fruit trees. Fountain-courts and small orchards similarly formed the theme around which smaller homes in the city were arranged.

Like an Escher painting, as you zoom in and out of the city and Fort, different variations and scales of this interlinked pattern reveal themselves, simultaneously simple and complex; repeating the motif of social and spatial permeability.


How is this aspect of permeability related to energy? 

A porous urban structure through permutations of typologies that use a minimum number of buildings, ensures that construction costs and operational costs are kept low. These costs are also minimised by using open space intelligently so that there is least interference with geology, landform, or nature. We see this even in the richest and most expensive parts of Shahjahanabad. Additionally, the other device of making a permeable city — by maximising the use of gardens as open spaces, and maximising tree plantations in these gardens — also significantly reduces embodied and extended energy use. 


So, trees lined Chandni Chowk and Faiz Bazaar: the two widest and most ceremonial streets in the central east-west and southern part of Shahjahanabad, where the maximum amount of traffic and activities were centred. Canals drawing from the river-system flowed down their length. Large public gardens — which were essentially orchards — were located adjacent to these streets, and formed the grand finale around their junction with the imperial chowks right in front of the Fort. These tree plantations worked as bio-mass heat sinks: cooling tempers, shading the ground, recharging ground-water levels, filtering dust, and creating places of beauty. Narrower inner lanes were shaded by flanking buildings and could dispense with trees, which were instead planted within private and public gardens and courts in these areas. Other aspects of good practice we see in the design of both the Fort and Shahjahanabad reinforce efficient and egalitarian use of energy: through correct orientation of built structures; the use of shading devices in buildings and in open spaces; incorporating non-wasteful water-features such as shallow canals, fountains, wells; and celebrating the river. 

How does this achieve Equity? 

First, such a typology ensures there is enough public space and infra-structural provision for people to mingle among themselves throughout the city. The great number of open and semi-open spaces that punctuate different parts of Shahjahanabad in a well-thought out layout, allow both planned and spontaneous activity of a diverse kind, which is one of the hallmarks of urbanity. These spaces occur as shaded chowks, step-wells, ghats, colonnades along the streets, pavilions, public gardens, orchards, canals. Sources from different times record how people meet, stroll, play, picnic, watch spectacles, feast, swim, and participate in performances here. 


Such activities rooted in social equity are present in earlier cities too, as we learn from court descriptions of people gathering on the river-bank at Agra to enjoy the sight of the Yamuna decorated with tiny floating lamps as part of the celebrations of the wedding of Dara Shikoh. And as we see in miniature paintings like this which show the procession bearing nuptial gifts for his wedding. However, it is in the Red Fort and Shahjahanabad, which were conceived and created together that these activities are so thoughtfully provided for in a formal linked urban scheme. There is also designated space and time to intercede with the Emperor directly — in the Hall of Public Audience inside the Fort, or below his private balcony on the river bank. 


Additionally, the design of the city and Fort fosters climate equity, by allowing the cooling effects of the river to penetrate deeper into the city, so that as many people as possible share benefits of climate-protection. We see in different renditions that the urban landscape along the river-front is not blocked or clogged by a high density of buildings, but instead features many orchards amidst which are set a very few buildings. Possibly as part of this permeable design, the western parts of the Fort and the city, farthest away from the river, have a relatively denser built-mass and enclosing walls, while the Fort’s imperial pavilions and gardens as also many rich noblemen’s havelis and gardens, are located directly along the expanse of the Yamuna. They overlook green fields beyond the Yamuna banks, which is not built upon. 


Availability and ownership of space in Shahjahanabad was not reduced to a single denominator of wealth, but revolved around an overlapping basis of multiple affiliations. Thus, within the walls of the Fort, space was organised not merely for imperial use but for a multiplicity of interlinked functions from karkhanas to kitchen-gardens to courts of justice, and for many users including administrators, soldiers, attendants, craftspeople. Similarly, the home of each nobleman or prosperous trader or important official in the city, did not just house their families but also included around them various other homes and families with whom they had a mutually dependent relationship of patronage and service. The device of inner courts and gardens, and layers of space with their surrounding verandahs and halls, allowed multiple domains of privacy for these different groups.


Poorer people were not rendered invisible, or pushed to the outskirts. They were a part of each precinct and neighbourhood; key contributors to the economy and functioning of the city. Neighbourhoods, mohallas and katras were organised according to shared trades and professions, and accommodated many income and skill levels related to those communities of trades, who produced and created hand-crafted artefacts right in the city. So, spatial and functional equity were applied with sense and sensibility, unlike today when even things of everyday use, are made far away in different countries or continents.


Giving space to people

Let me expand on this. On first glance, it may seem that it is an inevitable and unfair benefit of privilege that the Emperor occupies the river-side, ringed around by trees and orchards. But such urban and architectural planning is not merely a situation of using power for personal benefit. There is an idea of ecological equity in such a siting. 

The Emperor and his family may have one of the best locations in the new city, but they do not monopolise this privilege. Instead, they use it to allow less affluent people in the city, access to both the physical space of the river-bank, as well as the climatic effect of the river. Thus, there is a daily morning ritual mentioned in Mughal-histories as well as people’s accounts, where the sandy river-banks in front of the Emperor’s private palaces on the eastern walls of the Fort are open to the populace of the city and empire: to get darshan of the Emperor, to be seen by him, and even to intercede directly for justice.


The decision to construct a small proportion of built structures close to the river, by locating rich patrons here who follow a typology of constructing not the maximum but only the optimum number of built-structures in the form of havelis with fore-courts, big orchards and pavilions, helped to reduce temperatures in two ways. First, the gardens, as part of the noblemen’s havelis, increased the bio-mass in the vicinity of the Yamuna; secondly, the configuration of a few buildings amongst gardens and orchards, channelised the micro-climate created by the Yamuna deeper into the city. It thus ensured that the breezes and cooling effect of the Yamuna were not just confined to the imperial palace-pavilions, or colonised by those lucky enough to be located next to the river. I call this the jali effect: the planning version of the architectural device of  the perforated screens that interspersed and connected the Fort’s imperial pavilions, especially along the river banks. 


Neither was the riverfront taken over entirely by private, or even by imperial functions. Though the Red Fort did command a swathe of the central river-view towards the eastern end of the city, and its high fortification walls came between the main Chandni Chowk street and the Yamuna; on either side of the Fort, the view opened up through public gardens. There were many public ghats too. Flanking the banks on the city-edge beyond the Red Fort, they had airy pavilions and chattris which stepped down along wide steps to the river itself. These ghats, accessible river-banks, and orchards, made the river-front both spatially and visually accessible to many people and permeable to cool river-breezes.


Imagine if instead of these, a dense collection of small, opaque, buildings had been positioned on the eastern edge of the city close to its river-banks. These would have obviously blocked both the river breeze and the river view. They would also have impeded public access to the banks. If we look at Shahjahanabad, pre-1857, before the British destroyed so much of it, we also see that even those of its parts located away from the Yamuna, were devised with an ever-present awareness of the river and its canals and feeder channels. Water was a central part of planning and living in the city; topographical routes, natural courses to the river were not interrupted, built upon or polluted.


Despite the appropriation and apportioning of many gardens and open spaces, and incursions into the physical and social fabric of the city by the British, a fair number of these still remained till 200 years after the Fort’s founding— as shown in records such as paintings of its river-facade from the 1820s, or the detailed 1846 map of Shahjahanabad, or photographs from a little before 1857. After 1857, the careful planning and ecological sensitivity of Shahjahanabad were reversed by British engineering, who among other things, covered over the central canals of Chandni Chowk and Faiz Bazaar, and turned important channels in the city into drains, including the one from Kabuli Gate.


Reading between the Lines

The observation and perception of these underlying themes of permeability, energy and equity, allows us to read between the lines, and beyond our prejudices and those of chroniclers of records. One of the principles of good research is to access diverse opinions, especially those who may seem to have an opposite point of view. 

One such was the French traveller, Francois Bernier, an inhabitant of Shahjahanabad, who gives us a picture of it  shortly after its establishment in the mid 17th century. Bernier as a European visitor writes ‘that the capital of Hindoustan is not destitute of handsome buildings, although they bear no resemblance to those in Europe’.


It is this lack of resemblance that seems to get in his way of understanding the logic of Shahjahanabad. He avers that ‘there are no streets like ours of S.Denis’, and ‘[t]hat which so much contributes to the beauty of European towns, the brilliant appearance of the shops, is wanting in Delhi. He observes that the ‘two principal streets of the city’ have ‘open shops, where, during the day artisans work, bankers sit...and merchants exhibit their wares’. He writes disparagingly about ‘the five streets apart from the two principal ones’, amid which are ‘dispersed the habitations of Mansebdars, rich merchants and others’…[i]ntermixed with these different houses is an immense number of small ones, built of mud and thatched with straw, in which lodge the common troopers, and all that vast multitude of servants and camp-followers…’. Indeed, Bernier cannot shake off his disapproval of the many 'wretched mud and thatch houses’ that are seen throughout the city. Bernier’s bias of believing mud and thatch to be inferior materials, is not necessarily shared by either the citizens or the rulers of Shahjahanabad. They are accepted as climate-friendly, easily renewable materials to be used as occasion demands especially when required for deferring capital expenditure. Even the walls of the city and imperial Shalimar Bagh pavilions are first constructed in sun-dried brick.


While noting that the ‘dwellings of the omrahs, though mostly situated on the banks of the river and in the suburbs, are yet scattered in every direction’, he writes of the shops, where: ‘For one that makes a display of beautiful and fine cloths, silk and other stuffs striped with gold and silver, turbans embroidered with gold, and brocades, there are at least five and twenty where nothing is seen but pots of oil or piles of butter, piles of basket filled with rice, barley, chick-peas, wheat, and an endless variety of other grain and pulse, the ordinary aliment not only of the Gentiles, who never eat meat, but of the lower class of Mahometans, and a considerable portion of the military.’


If we leave aside his conviction about the superiority of streets and cities in his own country, we can read between the lines in Bernier’s record, to see what they reveal about the physical form and social structure of the city. So, we see

  • How it is designed to be inhabited by the rich and poor alike; 
  • That it is the richer inhabitants who travel out (to their large estates, private gardens and baghs in the suburbs), while the very heart of the city makes space for the poor; 
  • That there is an endless variety of people who throng the market in front of the Fort and the 'royal square’ adjoining it — the same space, where at night are encamped the Rajas who are assigned guard-duty for the Fort, and where the royal horses are exercised in the morning; 
  • That the main entrance streets of the city have markets — not empty promenades or un-peopled vistas; 
  • That these markets do not just display expensive 'lifestyle' wares (as in the malls today) but also basic grain and staple food for all, including the less affluent;
  • And that these markets additionally accommodate artisans too, the mainstay of the economic system and the industrial base of the city — i.e. they make space for skills and knowledge as well as goods. In other words, the economic, technical, industrial, commercial, recreational aspects of the city are seamlessly integrated.


Thus, it is not as if the Fort and the city lacked formal and grand ordered and structured avenues, forecourts and gardens. But these were not segregated into manicured, superficial showpieces. They instead allowed and encouraged multiple functions by varying users. As one moved into the residential areas from these avenues and public gardens, greater degrees of architectural freedom and territorial adaptation of spaces were permissible. 


Such an urban character — democratic despite a political dispensation governed by a monarchy — is worth applauding and emulating. All the spatial and architectural clues of an inclusive city are here — if only we have the sensibility to see them: multi-functional flexible spaces catering to mixed-land use and mixed income groups; a proliferation of public open areas used differently by various people at different times of the day.

A city that makes the rich (who can afford it) travel out to the periphery of the city and keeps the centre accessible and inviting even for the less rich while creating opportunities usable by all classes and kinds of people; a city that organises market and support activities on main travel nodes. A city that celebrates the river it draws life from; that gives back to the earth to stands on. A humane, equitable and ecologically responsible city. 


Increasing Perception and Empathy

In my under-graduate years at the School of Planning and Architecture at Delhi, I was unaware that the Yamuna flowed practically under our noses — even though we were located on its erstwhile banks, just a few kilometres south of the Red Fort. In the late 1980s and early 90s, the intimidating width of the Ring Road and the looming bulk of the Indira Gandhi Stadium, obscured all sight or sense of the river — as it does even more today.


The river — the very reason for continuous inhabitation in the region of Delhi from pre-historic times — did not also figure in the academic design exercises set to us by our galaxy of distinguished faculty. The Yamuna did not have any presence or role in developing our design thinking, unless we had family or personal associations with it. Many of us came to SPA from different parts of the country. For us, the Yamuna was rendered invisible and superfluous in the planning of the city. Perhaps that is why it continues to evade the collective imaginations of generations of graduates and practitioners even from reputedly one of the premier institutes of architecture and planning in the country.


In contrast, when I was re-reading The Shahjahanama of Inayat Khan recently, (this is an abridgement of the court-histories of Shah Jahan by his librarian, Inayat Khan) I was struck by this statement.

 ‘Several years before, the thought came to his Majesty’s omniscient mind that he should select some pleasant site on the banks of the aforesaid river, distinguished by its genial climate, where he might find a splendid fort and delightful edifices.’

The process of research, analysis and writing on the Fort and city, including its spatial and geometrical analysis, makes me appreciate the significance of this statement. But most people today would be unable to match this quote to the place: that the ‘aforesaid river’ mentioned above is none other than the Yamuna in the heart of the NCR, the National Capital Region of Delhi.


The decision 400 years ago to ‘select some pleasant site on the banks of the river, distinguished by its genial climate’, for ‘a splendid fort and delightful edifices’ shows us that site selection was a matter of careful concern based on appropriateness for habitation, particularly from the point of view of climate and geology. What is unmistakable in the vision of the city, is that the river permeates its very conception. As The Shahjahanama of Inayat Khan records:Shah Jahan]‘] ‘envisioned that streams of water should be made to flow through the proposed fort and that its terraces overlook the river’. 

Celebrating the River

As I re-read Bernier’s records of his stay in Shahjahanabad, I understand that his note ‘Excepting the side where it is defended by the river, the city is encompassed by walls of brick,’ should not be read as just a stray comment or a tardy response to defense — which is what Bernier presumes and which we may accept as an obvious conclusion — but appreciated for its value in making the city permeable for climatic and social benefit.


And so, as I look beyond the Fort at activists highlighting how the pollution in Yamuna is at its worst today, I understand that the first step in making rivers live again, is to release their banks from colonisation by large buildings, power stations, bus parking, tarmac, concrete, high fences, noxious use. To make them visible and permeable as they were in Shahjahanabad. It is because the river and its nahrs and channels have been covered over, hidden or pushed away from people, that have hastened its transformation into a sewer. The ritual occasional use for visarjan or shraddh bring this pollution into view and close contact for brief periods, and are forgotten or ignored again after that.


Yet, like Bernier, our references for urban models are increasingly based only on those that generate an impressive public appearance and show, or are characterised by imposing and awe-inspiring regularity. The Dutch educator and architect, N J Habraken, in his masterly analysis in The Appearance of the Form, explains the different world-views and ‘fundamental collective images concerning shared space’. These govern both the role, and therefore, the form of public space. In Western contexts, these are generally inviolate and cannot be questioned. Thus, predetermined geometries and fixed boundaries define and present public space with authority. In many eastern cultures, however, public space is an arena as well as an outcome of negotiation. There is less obsession with creating form. Instead the emphasis is on a complex web of relationships, which in turn generates particular social and territorial patterns in an economic and efficient manner.


To put this in context, imagine for a moment that the India Gate vista leading up to Rashtrapati Bhawan has colonnades for formal markets and spontaneous pop-ups; for craftspeople to work; for tailors, watch-repair stalls, food vendors. Not prim lines of trees but orchards and public spaces — free and open for musicians, story-tellers, artistes and orators to practise and perform. Imagine the effect of planting native fruit and medicinal trees and shrubs; of garden groves along roads. Of planning for people rather than vehicles. Of cleaner air and happier citizens. Imagine the city as a place of learning and healing. If that seems difficult, instead invest in an effort of memory. Think back to a summer, when despite the ominous virus and the devastation, cities were cool and non-toxic, streets and skies were unprecedentedly welcoming of vegetation, birds and animals. You may then perhaps be able to imagine that transformation that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sing about when they say: ‘I'd rather be a forest than a street’. And through a combination of imagination with empathy, observation and perception, maybe we all can get the forest back in our streets and cities — as it perhaps was once in the Red Fort and Shahjahanabad.

Monday, September 2, 2024

Making Cities Equitable and Ecologically Responsible

Reimagining the City’s Future through its Past


‘Several years before, the thought came to his Majesty’s omniscient mind that he should select some pleasant site on the banks of the aforesaid river, distinguished by its genial climate, where he might find a splendid fort and delightful edifices.’

The ‘aforesaid river’ mentioned above — from The Shahjahanama of Inayat Khan— is none other than the Yamuna. And the ‘pleasant site on its banks, chosen as the location for ‘a splendid fort and delightful edifices’ by the Emperor Shah Jahan, is in the heart of the NCR, the National Capital Re- gion of Delhi.

Most people today would be unable to match this quote to the place. Indeed, ‘distinguished by its genial climate’ is not how residents of Delhi would describe the metropolis. My niece moved into the NCR a year ago after living practically all her life in Mumbai. She disclosed how she and a col- league — who was also an ex-college mate in Ahmedabad, a city that is very hot for most of the year — were wondering whether there is any season in Delhi when the weather can be called ‘good’!

Those of us, however, who have lived here for many more years, may recollect bracing sunny win- ters, balmy springs, and golden autumns. Even the hot summers were not unbearable. They would be punctuated by short dust-storms every three or four days. These, fearsome while they lasted, would immediately bring down the temperature significantly. The season which was perhaps more difficult than the others, was the end of the monsoons. And one of the ways to cope with that, was the typically Delhi architectural device of the barsati. Derived from the Hindi word barsat or rain, this was a room on the roof-terrace in many low-density areas of Delhi, adjoining the mumti above the staircase.

Literally meaning of/for the rain, it was a place where one could specially enjoy the monsoons, watch the spectacle of the clouds and rain, and catch the slightest hint of a breeze. This space — which was essentially just a room (sometimes with a verandah) looking out onto the terrace — worked as an extra room, a family store, or a living area for the servants. It had a fairly flexible in- terpretation, defined as ‘a habitable room/rooms on the roof of the building with or without toi- let/kitchen.'It was also often rented out to students or young professionals who could not afford an entire house or a floor. According to some sources, till three decades ago, ‘75% of small rentable properties in many residential suburbs were barsatis’.3

A barsati in Delhi thus, was not just for the rain, but also for an intermingling of streams of differ- ent social and cultural strands. One such barsati, a convivial cheery space shared by three college students on a shoe-string budget, forms the fulcrum of the story and the key moments in the 1981 cult Hindi film Chasme Baddoor directed by Sai Paranjpe. Newcomers to the film, however, may not recognise this setting. There are almost no barsatis in Delhi today, even in the very few houses on plots that have survived the onslaught of developer built high-rise flats. Building bye-laws in early post-independence times which limited construction to two storeys, with an allowance for cover-

p.406, The Shahjahanama of Inayat Khan, An Abridged History of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, complied by his Royal Librarian, The Nineteenth century manuscript Translation of A.R. Fuller (British Library, Add.30, 777) Edited and Com- piled by W E Begley and Z A Desai, OUP Delhi, 1990

http://www.tcpo.gov.in/sites/default/files/TC

The Guardian, Debika Ray, 16 December 2015, ‘Rooftop Cities; the transformation of Delhi’s once affordable ‘barsati’ homes’.

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ing a small area on the third storey,have now changed to allow four full storeys in residential ar- eas. Sky-rocketing costs of land and property have led house-owners to cover every available inch, rather than leave any useable open terrace area. And in the name of globalisation and progress, practically everyone aspires to live in typologies suitable only for climes in the upper northern part of the hemisphere. Even the plotted house-typology as planned and built in British and Post-inde- pendence New Delhi is an imported concept, and one that is sub-urban, not urban in character and potential.

I
And so these typologies are fundamentally perverse to our regions: climatically and culturally. Fa- cades that sport large picture-windows, glass balconies, metal pergolas, no usable verandahs or sensible shading devices, inevitably heat up in the summers, block monsoon breezes, and give lit- tle scope to interact with or enjoy the seasons. They are rendered unliveable without consuming huge amounts of energy on a daily basis. Their construction and embodied-energy draw relentless- ly and continuously on the earth, water and air.

As such a building vocabulary becomes the norm, with multiple flatted accommodation on a plot that would earlier house just a family or two — most residential plots now have at least a dozen air-conditioners fitted in. These belch out heat from practically each room in each flat. In a vicious cycle, such energy-intensive and heat-emitting cooling devices transform the city into a man-made emitter of heat, exponentially pushing the demand for air-conditioners even in less well-to-do ar- eas. The dominance of ill-suited industrial building materials such as concrete, over the past seven decades, which radiate heat even after sundown, only exacerbates the situation.

And so the entire city has become a veritable man-made inferno, as the CSE study on the changing nature of heat in Indian cities shows.And the cooling effect of the river — the very reason for the ‘genial climate’ sought by Shah Jahan’s builders to locate a new city here 400 years ago — is ill- used. Disregarded in planning schemes, it is now reduced to a dirty drain except in the monsoons when it swells to threatening proportions. All the emphasis is on using up land to make endless tarred roads, raised or buried metro-lines, endless loops of bridges and flyovers — all of which ex- acerbate heating in the summers and flooding in the monsoons, apart from ceaselessly promoting and pushing automobile transport.

Jane Jacobs wrote many years ago of the phenomenon in her part of the world where “the car is not only a monstrous land-eater itself: it abets that other insatiable land-eater—endless, strung-out suburbanization.”Rendered invisible within all this, relegated to the periphery and the most un- liveable parts with the least amount of civic facilities, house the majority of the city’s population, its poorest inhabitants. In hastily made, invariably ill-constructed dwellings, easy prey to the weather that gets more extreme each day. The planning device of suburbanisation, indeed the very concept of the NCR itself, needs to be challenged and changed, if we are seriously looking to make cities humane, equitable and ecologically responsible.7

‘In individual residential plots, normally only two storeys may be allowed plus an optional provision of barsati floor at the top...When a barsati is permitted, not more than 25% of the area on the ground floor or the floor immediately below the barsati or 500 sq.ft, whichever is less should be allowed to be covered including the area covered by the staircase leading to the barsati”. https://dda.gov.in/sites/default/files/inline-files/bbl_1983.pdf p. 94.

Anatomy of an Inferno-Decoding urban heat stress in Cities, CSE Webinar, https://www.youtube.com/live/ OwQcgHffJkQ?feature=shared

https://www.archdaily.com/1016717/jane-jacobs-cyclist, Peter L Laurence, May 17, 2024 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2226585620300637

page2image66215856 page2image66216064

II
If the planning and architecture of cities can cause such unsustainable and severe implications on health, society and environment, the solutions must also lie in tackling it at these levels. In other words, at the interlinked macro and micro scales; at overall planning and regulations as also archi- tectural forms, materials and detail.

To do so, we have to return to the river and give it centre-stage again. Even in the changed equa- tion of the city and its surroundings today and with all the odds stacked against it, the Yamuna — despite its denuded, polluted, smelly state — still exercises a beneficial effect on the environment around it. So much so, that when it was as hot as 33 degrees centigrade at 7.30 in the morning in the month of May 2024, there was a perceptible drop in the temperature along the stretch of the road crossing the Yamuna into Delhi.

What must it have been like living in the Delhi region, when urban form was designed as a re- sponse to the climate, not in defiance of it? In the time of Shahjahanabad, established by the Em- peror Shah Jahan in the middle of the century? Especially at and around the Red Fort, right on the banks of the river — the ‘pleasant site’ that is recorded to have been chosen by his builders? Did the act of constructing an imperial palace and entire city change the attributes of the site and its genial climate? For the better or for worse? In either case, are there any cues we can take from the planning and building of the city then?

What is unmistakable in the vision of the city then, is that the river permeates the very conception of the ambitious new construction venture. Court-histories of Shah Jahan record how: ‘he envi- sioned that streams of water should be made to flow through the proposed fort and that its ter- races overlook the river’.The benefits of privilege are of course, evident in the fact that it fell to the emperor and his family to occupy the best location in the new city, ringed around by trees and orchards. One must note, however — unlike today when the richest parts of the city are ironically not those lining the river, but well away from it — that they recognised the worth of the river.

Not just the imperial fort but also many of the havelis, large mansions belonging to the noblemen, were located directly along the expanse of the Yamuna. These overlooked beyond its banks on the opposite side, green fields with practically no intrusion from the city. Thus, the urban landscape just behind the enclosing city walls, as well as the site-planning within the river-walls of the imper- ial Red Fort featured many orchards amidst which were set a very few buildings. It was only the western ends of the Fort and the city, farthest away from the river, which were allowed to have a relatively denser built-mass.

This planning and location is not merely a situation of using power for personal benefit. It also ac- commodates a larger public function. If a dense collection of small, private dwellings or buildings had been positioned on the eastern edge of the city close too its river-banks, these would have blocked both the river breezes and the river view. They would also have impeded public access to the banks. Instead, the decision to build a low-density of structures ranged within trees and gar- den-orchards, and the provision of open public spaces along the Yamuna, made the space of the river-front both accessible to many people and permeable to cool river-breezes.

This device of constructing a small proportion of built structures close to the river, helped to re- duce temperatures in two ways. The gardens, a part of the noblemen’s havelis, increased the bio- mass in the vicinity of the Yamuna, and it channelised the micro-climate created by the Yamuna deeper into the city. This configuration may be seen as another version of the architectural device

page3image66216480

p.406, The Shahjahanama of Inayat Khan, Begley and Desai.

of a ‘jali’ — the perforated screens that interspersed and connected what seemed to constitute the continuous facade of the imperial pavilions along the river banks. Such urban and architectural planning ensured that the breezes and cooling effect of the Yamuna were not just confined to the imperial palace-pavilions, or colonised by those lucky enough to be located next to the river.

Not that the Yamuna riverfront was taken over entirely by private, or even by imperial functions. The Red Fort did command a swathe of the central river-view towards the eastern end of the city, and its high fortification walls came between the main Chandni Chowk street and the Yamuna. But on either side of the Fort, the view opened up through public gardens. There were many public ghats too. Flanking the banks on the city-edge beyond the Red Fort, their airy pavilions and chat- tris stepped down along wide steps to the river itself. And the sandy embankments at the foot of the river-front walls of the Fort were also open to the public. Even 200 years after its founding, de- spite the appropriation and apportioning of many gardens and open spaces, and the incursions into the physical and social fabric of the city by the British, a fair number of these still remained — as shown in records such as paintings of the river-facade of the Fort from as late as the 1820s, or the detailed 1846 map of Shahjahanabad, or photographs from a little before or around 1857.

III
In my under-graduate years at the School of Planning and Architecture at Delhi, I was unaware that the Yamuna flowed practically under our noses — even though we were located on its erst- while banks, just a few kilometres south of the Red Fort. This was also an outcome of faulty plan- ning and architecture. In the late 1980s and early 90s, the intimidating width of the Ring Road and the looming bulk of the Indira Gandhi Stadium, effectively obscured all sight or sense of the river. On the few instances when I did venture beyond them, as during a memorable bicycle relay-race at our college festival, I was concentrating much too hard on evading the traffic (and ensuring that we did not lose our lead!) to even register the proximity of the river.

This vital component of Delhi, the river — the very reason for continuous inhabitation in the re- gion of Delhi from pre-historic times — did not also figure in the academic design exercises set to us by our galaxy of distinguished faculty, which included many very famous architects. We did go far afield within and outside Delhi to study various architectural and natural contexts. We were also frequently dispatched to the ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla in our neighbourhood, to observe and sketch its buildings. Indeed, we could scarcely escape the sight of them right from first-year — es- pecially those of us who had places assigned next to the windows, and spent a good proportion of our time gazing out from our class studio on the third-floor.

But the Yamuna did not have any presence or role in developing our design thinking, unless we had family or personal associations with it. Many of us, came to SPA from different parts of the country, as I did, growing up in the environment of far-flung army cantonments all over India. It had already been rendered invisible and superfluous in the planning of the city.

Is that why the Yamuna continues to evade the collective imaginations of generations of graduates and practitioners from reputedly one of the premier institutes of architecture and planning in the country? And so, perhaps the first step in making the Yamuna and other rivers relevant again, is to make them visible again —and permeable as in Shahjahanabad. To create free and public access, and release their banks from colonisation by large buildings, power stations, bus parking, tarmac, high fences, barred stretches, and noxious use.

IV
How about the rest of the city, away from the river?
If we look at Shahjahanabad, pre-1857, we see that even those of its parts located away from the Yamuna, were devised with an ever-present awareness of the river and its canals and feeder chan-

nels. And with a sense and sensibility that made water a central part of planning and living in the city; that ensured that topographical routes, natural courses and routes to the river were not inter- rupted, built upon or polluted.

Trees lined Chandni Chowk and Faiz Bazaar: the two widest, most ceremonial and important streets in the central east-west and southern part of Shahjahanabad, where the maximum amount of traffic and activities were centred. Canals drawing from the river-system flowed down their length. Large public gardens — which were essentially orchards — were located adjacent to these streets, and formed the grand finale around their junction with the imperial chowks right in front of the Fort. These tree plantations worked as bio-mass heat sinks: cooling tempers, shading the ground, recharging ground-water levels, filtering dust, and creating places of beauty.

Neither were the poorer people rendered invisible, or pushed only to the outskirts.

They were a part of each precinct and neighbourhood, making the city a place of mixed land-use and mixed-income groups. Availability and ownership of space in Shahjahanabad was not reduced to a single denominator of wealth. It revolved around an overlapping basis of multiple affiliations. The home of each nobleman or prosperous trader or important official did not just house their families but also included around them various other homes and families with whom they had a mutually dependent relationship of patronage and service.

Neighbourhoods, mohallas and katras were organised according to shared trades and professions, and accommodated many income and skill levels related to those communities of trades. Just as within the walls of the Fort, space was organised not merely for imperial use but for a multiplicity of interlinked functions from karkhanas to kitchen-gardens to courts of justice. And for active users, including administrators, soldiers, attendants, craftspeople.

Large havelis — around which smaller habitations clustered — disposed throughout different precincts instead of being concentrated in just one part of the city, repeated the same urban motif of social and spatial permeability. Architecturally, these havelis echoed on a smaller scale the pat- tern of buildings within the Fort, set around and within fountain-courts or gardens of orange, pomegranate, and other fruit trees. Fountain-courts and small orchards similarly formed the theme around which smaller homes in the city were arranged.

Like an Escher painting, as you zoom in and out of the city and Fort, different variations and scales of this interlinked pattern reveal themselves, simultaneously simple and complex. Tried and tested in the Indian subcontinent from Harappan times, this pattern was composed of sequences of walled courtyards-verandahs-halls-pavilions: a fluid building typology with some of its finest ex- amples visible within the Fort, as analysed and described at length in The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad.

V
It is not as if the Fort and the city lacked formal ordered and structured avenues, forecourts and gardens. But these were not segregated into manicured, superficial showpieces. They instead al- lowed and encouraged multiple functions by varying users. As one moved into the residential ar- eas from these avenues and public gardens, greater degrees of architectural freedom and territorial adaptation of spaces were permissible. The French traveller, Francois Bernier, was an inhabitant of the newly established city in the mid 17th century. He condescends to grant ‘that the capital of Hindoustan is not destitute of handsome buildings, although they bear no resemblance to those in

Europe’.But it is really this lack of resemblance that seems to get in his way of appreciating the logic of the city.

He avers that ‘there are no streets like ours of S.Denis’, and ‘[t]hat which so much contributes to the beauty of European towns, the brilliant appearance of the shops, is wanting in Delhi’.10 And so he cannot shake off his disapproval of the shops, where:

‘For one that makes a display of beautiful and fine cloths, silk and other stuffs striped with gold and silver, turbans embroidered with gold, and brocades, there are at least five and twenty where nothing is seen but pots of oil or piles of butter, piles of basket filled with rice, barley, chick-peas, wheat, and an endless variety of other grain and pulse, the ordinary aliment not only of the Gentiles, who never eat meat, but of the lower class of Mahometans, and a considerable portion of the military.’11

Bernier also observes that the ‘two principal streets of the city’ have ‘open shops, where, during the day artisans work, bankers sit...and merchants exhibit their wares’; that the ‘houses of the mer- chants are built over these warehouses, at the back of the arcades; and that the ‘rich merchants have their dwellings elsewhere'.12 He writes about ‘the five streets apart from the two principal ones’, amid which are ‘dispersed the habitations of Mansebdars, rich merchants and others’... [i]ntermixed with these different houses is an immense number of small ones, built of mud
and thatched with straw, in which lodge the common troopers, and all that vast multitude of ser- vants and camp-followers...’.
13

And he notes that the ‘dwellings of the omrahs, though mostly situated on the banks of the river and in the suburbs, are yet scattered in every direction'.14 Himself dependent on the influence and patronage of a nobleman to whose household he was attached, he cannot shake off his disapproval of such a layout, of the many 'wretched mud and thatch houses’15 that are seen throughout the city.

Leaving aside his conviction about the superiority of streets and cities of in his own country, what does the record by Bernier as an independent, outside observer, tell us? To me it reveals a number of things about the physical form and social structure of the city:

  • How it is designed to be inhabited by the rich and poor alike;

  • That it is the richer inhabitants who travel out (to their large estates, private gardens and

    baghs in the suburbs), while the very heart of the city makes space for the poor;

  • That there is an endless variety of people who throng the market in front of the Fort and the

    'royal square’ adjoining it — the same space, where at night are encamped the Rajas who are assigned guard-duty for the Fort, and where the royal horses are exercised in the morn- ing;

  • That the main entrance streets of the city have markets — not empty promenades or un- peopled vistas;

    pp. 248-9, Francois Bernier: Travels in the Mughal Empire, 1656-68, First Published London 1891; Reprint Asian Educational Services AES, New Delhi, 1996

    10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 p. 245 13 p. 246 14 p. 247 15 p. 246

page6image66218352
  • That these markets do not just display expensive 'lifestyle' wares (as in the malls today) but also basic grain and staple food for all, that include the less affluent;

  • And that these markets additionally accommodate artisans too, the mainstay of the eco- nomic system and the industrial base of the city — i.e. they make space for skills and knowledge as well as goods. In other words, the economic, technical, industrial, commer- cial, recreational aspects of the city are seamlessly integrated.

    Such an urban character — democratic despite a political dispensation governed by a monarchy — is worth applauding and emulating. All the spatial and architectural clues of an inclusive city are here: multi-functional flexible spaces catering to mixed-land use and mixed income groups; a pro- liferation of public open areas used differently by various people at different times of the day. A city that makes the rich (who can afford it) travel out to the periphery of the city and keeps the cen- tre accessible for the less rich while creating opportunities usable by all classes and kinds of peo- ple; a city that organises market and support activities on main travel nodes. A city that celebrates the river it draws life from; that gives back to the earth to stands on.

    A humane, equitable and ecologically responsible city.

    VI
    Yet, like Bernier, our references for urban models are increasingly based only on those that gener- ate an impressive public appearance and show, or are characterised by imposing and awe-inspir- ing regularity. The Dutch educator and architect, N J Habraken, in his masterly analysis in 
    The Ap- pearance of the Form, explains the different world-views and ‘fundamental collective images con- cerning shared space’.16 These govern both the role, and therefore, the form of public space. In Western contexts, these are generally inviolate and cannot be questioned. Thus, predetermined geometries and fixed boundaries define and present public space with authority. In many Middle- eastern and eastern cultures, however, public space is an arena as well as an outcome of negotia- tion. There is less obsession with creating form. Instead the emphasis is on a complex web of rela- tionships and usage, which in turn generates and accommodates particular social and territorial patterns in an economic and efficient manner.

    To put this in context, imagine for a moment that the India Gate vista leading up to Rashtrapati Bhawan has colonnades and arcades hosting a variety of goods for the rich and the poor; space for formal markets and spontaneous pop-ups; for craftspeople to work; for tailors, watch-repair stalls, food stalls. Not prim lines of trees but dense orchards and public spaces — free and open for street vendors, musicians, story-tellers, artistes and orators to practise and perform.

    Imagine the city as a place of learning and healing. Imagine the effect of the simple expedient of planting many native fruit, medicinal trees and shrubs. Big garden groves lining the wide dusty roads. Of planning for people rather than vehicles. Of cleaner air and happier citizens. And withal, more bird and animal life, cooler temperatures and less road rage, I daresay— even in May.

    If that flight of imagination seems utopian, naive, or just plain difficult, we can instead invest in an effort of memory. Of a lived summer not so long ago. An uncertain summer, when despite the ominous fear of the virus and the devastation and havoc especially wrought on the poor, the air was cooler and non-toxic, streets and skies were unprecedentedly welcoming of vegetation, birds and animals.

page7image66218976

16 p. 34, ‘Sharing’, The Appearance of the Form. Awater Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2nd edition, 1985.

And if we are to continue to imagine transformations, why then, as Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sing: ‘I'd rather be a forest than a street’.17 And if not, I’d rather get the forest into our streets and our cities.

page8image66219392

17 From "El Cóndor Pasa (If I Could)”, a 1970 cover by Simon & Garfunkel (with English lyrics by Paul Simon, on the al- bum Bridge over Troubled Water ) of "El Cóndor Pasa’ — the 1913 orchestral musical piece composed by the Peruvian com- poser, Daniel Alomía Robles, based on traditional Andean music.

Wednesday, May 22, 2024

The City as a Place of Learning and Healing

It was 33 degrees centigrade at 7.30 am.

But, as we crossed the Yamuna, we noticed a perceptible drop in the temperature. Even in its denuded, smelly state, the river exercised this effect on the climate.

What must it have been like living in Delhi, I wondered, in the time of Shah Jahan? In the Red Fort, right on the banks of the river? Ringed around by trees and orchards, within and without. And green fields extending beyond the expanse of the Yamuna?

Of course, as always, the emperor and his family would have had the best of it. And further north along the Yamuna, the noblemen with their large havelis amidst their garden-orchards, would also have been close to the cool breeze.

The river, in fact, permeates the very conception of the Red Fort. Court-histories of Shah Jahan record that: "he envisioned that streams of water should be made to flow through the proposed fort and that its terraces overlook the river.But, as I reflected on the inevitable benefits of privilege, I realised such a location was not merely a simplistic situation of using power for personal benefit. It also accommodated a larger public function. A dense collection of small, private dwellings or buildings would have in practical terms, blocked the river breeze and the river view — as well as public spatial access to the banks.

It was the low-density of built structures ranged within trees and gardens along the Yamuna, and the provision of open public spaces, that made the river-front permeable. Just behind the enclosing city walls, the urban landscape as well as that within the Fort featured many orchards amidst which were set a very few buildings. In contrast, it was the western end of the Red Fort and the city, farthest away from the river, which had a relatively denser built-mass. This device of constructing a small proportion of built structures close to the river, helped to reduce temperatures in two ways. It increased the bio-mass in the vicinity of the Yamuna, and it channelised the micro-climate created by the Yamuna deeper into the city. This configuration may be seen as another version of the ‘jali motif’ — the perforated screens that interspersed and connected what seemed to constitute the continuous facade of the imperial pavilions along the river banks. Such urban and architectural planning ensured that the breezes and cooling effect of the Yamuna were not just confined to the imperial palace-pavilions, or colonised by those lucky enough to be located next to the river.

Not that the Yamuna riverfront was taken over entirely by private, or even by imperial functions. The Red Fort commanded a swathe of the central river-view towards the eastern end of the city, and its high fortification walls did come between the main Chandni Chowk street and the Yamuna. But on either side of the Fort, the view opened up through public gardens. There were many public ghats too. Flanking the banks on the city-edge beyond the Red Fort, their airy pavilions and chattris stepped down along wide steps to the river itself. And the sandy embankments at the foot of the river-front walls of the Fort were also open to the public. Even 200 years after the founding of Shahjahanabad, despite the appropriation and apportioning of many gardens and open spaces, and the incursions into its physical and social fabric by the British, a fair number of these still remained — as shown in records such as paintings of the river-facade of the Fort from as late as the 1820s, or the detailed 1846 map of Shahjahanabad, or photographs of the city from a little before or around 1857.

It seems incredible to me that in all my under-graduate years at the School of Planning and Architecture, I was unaware that the Yamuna flowed practically under our noses — located as we were on its erstwhile banks, just a few kilometres south of the Red Fort. In the late 1980s and early 90s, the intimidating width of the Ring Road and the looming bulk of the Indira Gandhi Stadium, effectively obscured all sight or sense of the river. On the few instances when I did venture beyond them, as during a memorable bicycle relay-race at our college festival, I was concentrating much too hard on evading the traffic (and ensuring that we did not lose our lead!) to even register the proximity of the river.

That I missed this vital component of Delhi may have been merely my lack of personal association with it, growing up as I did in far-flung army cantonments all over India. But neither do I recollect the river — the very reason for continuous inhabitation in the region of Delhi from pre-historic times — figuring in the academic design exercises set to us by our galaxy of distinguished faculty, which included many very famous architects. We did go far afield within and outside Delhi to study various architectural and natural contexts. We were also frequently dispatched to the ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla in our neighbourhood, to observe and analyse its buildings. Indeed, we could scarcely escape the sight of them right from first-year — especially those of us who had places assigned next to the windows, and spent a good portion of our time gazing out from our class studio on the third-floor. But the Yamuna did not have any presence or role in developing our design thinking.

I wonder why?

Was it because it had already been rendered invisible and superfluous in the planning of the city? Is that why the Yamuna continues to evade the collective imaginations of generations of graduates and practitioners from reputedly one of the premier institutes of architecture and planning in the country? And so, does it mean that the first step in making the Yamuna and other rivers relevant again, is to make them visible? To create free and public access, and release their banks from colonisation by large buildings, tarmac, high fences, barred stretches, and noxious use?

And how about the rest of the city, away from the river?
If we look at Shahjahanabad, pre-1857, we see that even those of its parts located away from the Yamuna, were devised with an ever-present awareness of the river and its canals and feeder channels. And with a sense and sensibility that made water a central part of planning and living in the city; that ensured that topographical routes, natural courses and routes to the river were not interrupted, built upon or polluted.

Trees lined Chandni Chowk and Faiz Bazaar: the two most ceremonial and important streets in the central east-west and southern part of Shahjahanabad, where the maximum amount of traffic and activities were centred. Canals drawing from the river-system flowed down their length. Large public gardens — which were essentially orchards — were located adjacent to these streets, and formed the grand finale around their junction with the imperial chowks right in front of the Fort. These acted as heat sinks: cooling tempers, shading the ground, recharging ground-water levels, filtering dust, and creating places of beauty.

Neither were the poorer people rendered invisible, or pushed only to the outskirts.

They were a part of each precinct and neighbourhood, making the city a place of mixed land-use and mixed-income groups. Availability and ownership of space in Shahjahanabad was not reduced to a single denominator of wealth. It revolved around an overlapping basis of multiple affiliations. The home of each nobleman or prosperous trader or important official did not just house their families, but also incorporated around them various other homes and families with whom there was a mutually dependent relationship of patronage and service.

Neighbourhoods, mohallas and katras were organised according to shared trades and professions, and accommodated many income and skill levels related to those communities of trades. Just as within the walls of the Fort, space was organised not merely for imperial use but for a multiplicity of interlinked functions from karkhanas to kitchen-gardens to courts of justice. And for active users, including administrators, soldiers, attendants, craftspeople.

Large havelis — around which smaller habitations clustered — disposed throughout different precincts instead of being concentrated in just one part of the city, repeated the same urban motif of social and spatial permeability. Architecturally, these havelis echoed on a smaller scale the pattern of buildings within the Fort, set around and within fountain-courts or gardens of orange, pomegranate, and other fruit trees. Fountain-courts and small orchards similarly formed the theme around which smaller homes in the city were arranged.

Like an Escher painting, as you zoom in and out of the city and Fort, different variations and scales of this interlinked pattern reveal themselves, simultaneously simple and complex. Tried and tested in the Indian subcontinent from Harappan times, this pattern was composed of sequences of walled courtyards-verandahs-halls-pavilions: a fluid building typology with some of its finest examples visible within the Fort, as analysed and described at length in The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad.

It is not as if the Fort and the city lacked formal ordered and structured avenues, forecourts and gardens. But these were not segregated into manicured, superficial showpieces. They instead allowed and encouraged multiple functions by varying users. As one moved into the residential areas from these avenues and public gardens, greater degrees of architectural freedom and territorial adaptation of spaces were permissible. The French traveller, Francois Bernier, was an inhabitant of the newly established city in the mid 17th century. He condescends to grant ‘that the capital of Hindoustan is not destitute of handsome buildings, although they bear no resemblance to those in Europe’.But it is really this lack of resemblance that seems to get in the way of his appreciating the logic of the city.

He avers that ‘there are no streets like ours of S.Denis', and '[t]hat which so much contributes to the beauty of European towns, the brilliant appearance of the shops, is wanting in Delhi'.And so he cannot shake off his disapproval of the shops here, where:

‘For one that makes a display of beautiful and fine cloths, silk and other stuffs striped with gold and silver, turbans embroidered with gold, and brocades, there are at least five and twenty where nothing is seen but pots of oil or piles of butter, piles of basket filled with rice, barley, chick-peas, wheat, and an endless variety of other grain and pulse, the ordinary aliment not only of the Gentiles, who never eat meat, but of the lower class of Mahometans, and a considerable portion of the military.’4

Bernier also observes that the ‘two principal streets of the city’ have ‘open shops, where, during the day artisans work, bankers sit...and merchants exhibit their wares’; that the ‘houses of the merchants are built over these warehouses, at the back of the arcades; and that the ‘rich merchants have their dwellings elsewhere'.He writes about ‘the five streets apart from the two principal ones’, amid which are ‘dispersed the habitations of Mansebdars, rich merchants and others’... [i]ntermixed with these different houses is an immense number of small ones, built of mud and thatched with straw, in which lodge the common troopers, and all that vast multitude of servants and camp-followers’.6

And he notes that the ‘dwellings of the omrahs, though mostly situated on the banks of the river and in the suburbs, are yet scattered in every direction'.Himself dependent on the influence and patronage of a nobleman to whose household he was attached, he cannot shake off his disapproval of such a layout, of the many 'wretched mud and thatch houses’that are seen throughout the city.

Leaving aside his conviction about the superiority of streets and cities of in his own country, what does the record by Bernier as an independent, outside observer, tell us? To me it reveals a number of things about the physical form and social structure of the city:

• How it is designed to be inhabited by the rich and poor alike;

• That it is the richer inhabitants who travel out (to their large estates, private gardens and baghs in the suburbs), while the very heart of the city makes space for the poor;

• That there is an endless variety of people who throng the market in front of the Fort and the 'royal square’ adjoining it — the same space, where at night are encamped the Rajas who are assigned guard-duty for the Fort, and where the royal horses are exercised in the morning; 

• That the main entrance streets of the city have markets — not empty promenades or un-peopled vistas;

• That these markets do not just display expensive 'lifestyle' stuff (as in the malls today) but also basic grain and staple food for all, that include the less affluent;

• And that these markets additionally accommodate artisans too, the mainstay of the economic system and the industrial base of the city — i.e. they make space for skills and knowledge as well as goods. In other words, the economic, technical, industrial, commercial, recreational aspects of the city are seamlessly integrated.

Such an urban character — democratic despite a political dispensation governed by a monarchy — is worth applauding and emulating. All the spatial and architectural clues of an inclusive city are here: multi-functional flexible spaces catering to mixed-land use and mixed income groups; a proliferation of public open areas used differently by various people at different times of the day. A city that makes the rich (who can afford it) travel out to the periphery of the city and keeps the centre accessible for the less rich while creating opportunities usable by all classes and kinds of people; a city that organises market and support activities on main travel nodes. A city that celebrates the river it draws life from; that gives back to the earth to stands on.

A humane, equitable and ecologically responsible city.

Yet, like Bernier, our references for urban models are increasingly based only on those that generate an impressive public appearance and show, or are characterised by imposing and awe-inspiring regularity. The Dutch educator and architect, N J Habraken, in his masterly analysis in The Appearance of the Form, explains the different world-views and ‘fundamental collective images concerning shared space’.These govern both the role, and therefore, the form of public space. In Western contexts, these are generally inviolate and cannot be questioned. Thus, predetermined geometries and fixed boundaries define and present public space with authority. In many Middle-eastern and eastern cultures, however, public space is an arena as well as an outcome of negotiation. There is less obsession with creating form. Instead the emphasis is on a complex web of relationships and usage, which in turn generates and accommodates particular social and territorial patterns.

To put this in context, imagine for a moment that the India Gate vista leading up to Rashtrapati Bhawan has colonnades and arcades hosting a variety of goods for the rich and the poor; space for formal markets and spontaneous pop-ups; for craftspeople to work; for tailors, watch-repair stalls, food stalls. Not prim lines of trees but dense orchards and scaled public spaces — free and open for street vendors, musicians, story-tellers, artistes and orators to practise and perform.

Imagine the city as a place of learning and healing. Imagine the effect of the simple expedient of planting many native fruit, medicinal trees and shrubs. Big garden-groves lining the wide dusty roads. Of planning for people rather than vehicles. Of cleaner air and happier citizens. And withal, more bird and animal life, cooler temperatures and less road rage, I daresay— even in May.

If that flight of imagination seems utopian, naive, or just plain difficult, we can instead invest in an effort of memory. Of a lived summer not so long ago. An uncertain summer, when despite the ominous fear of the virus and the devastation and havoc especially wrought on the poor, the streets and skies were unprecedentedly welcoming of vegetation, birds and animals.

And if we are to continue to imagine transformations, why then, as Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sing: ‘I'd rather be a forest than a street’.10 

And if not, I’d rather get the forest into our streets and our cities.


Notes:

p.406, The Shahjahanama of Inayat Khan, Begley and Desai.
pp. 248-9, Travels in the Mughal Empire, 1656-68Francois Bernier. First Published London 1891, Reprint Asian Educational Services AES, New Delhi, 1996
Ibid.
Ibid.
p. 245
p. 246
p. 247
p. 246
p. 34, ‘Sharing’, The Appearance of the Form. Awater Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2nd edition, 1985.
10 From "El Cóndor Pasa (If I Could)”, a 1970 cover by Simon & Garfunkel (with English lyrics by Paul Simon, on the album Bridge over Troubled Water ) of "El Cóndor Pasa’ — the 1913 orchestral musical piece composed by the Peruvian com- poser, Daniel Alomía Robles, based on traditional Andean music.


Shahjahanabad in c.1846-47 (X 1659, OIOC, BL)


 River front with pavilions and ghats, north of Red Fort (53/30, OIOC, BL)