Pictured Realities and Transformation/ Evolution of The Red Fort in Colonial Times

Link to the Recording of the entire Session 11: 

https://youtu.be/QLv4R-VmJA0?si=LLtv951AcnWti7rh

Text of the Talk

The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad in Mir ki Dilli - and After 

Pictured Realities and Transformation/ Evolution of The Red Fort in Colonial Times 

 

The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad: 2nd Edition

Very happy to share that the second edition of The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad is out! Many thanks to the entire team at Westland. 

Here's the link on Amazon:

https://amzn.eu/d/cAE33kK

History and its Expression in Architecture: Text of the Talk at the Bhopal Literature Festival

  Good morning.

I am delighted to be at the Bhopal Literary Festival, where the second edition of my book on the Red Fort of Shahjahanabad makes its debut. But I'm not going to talk about the book right now. 

What I intend to do instead as a prelude to what the book contains, is to take you backstage and share what is “behind the scenes”, as it were. And how and why the book came to be written. 

The Red Fort is so often in the news, that it would seem that we all know whatever there is to know about it. On the other hand, there is so little left of its original buildings that we may wonder what is it really that we can know from it? Researching on the book has been akin to doing a tightrope-act between the simultaneous existence of too much and too little on the Fort. Between getting inundated with information of one kind, to casting around far and wide in search of other information that is so elusive as to be almost impossible to track down. 

But I'm jumping ahead. 

My first coherent memory of visiting the Fort, was when I had already begun my training as an architect. In architectural education, one is constantly prodded to assess the possibilities of different places for different functions of habitation. And this was the question I found myself asking, as I walked through the Red Fort. How did the Mughal emperors — arguably some of the richest and most refined individuals of their time — live in the Fort? 

Indeed how did anyone live in the Fort? From what was visible within its walls, there was no way to figure this out. 

This question exercised me so much that I started ferreting around, and hunting for references on the Fort that would explain it. But much to my surprise, despite the Red Fort's iconic cultural and political importance, no one seemed to have seriously tried to seek answers to this question before me! Since I could not find any ready answer in any book, I began looking for first-hand sources on its original appearance and use — court-histories, paintings, maps. These were scattered in collections and museums in different parts of the world, ranging from Delhi to Dublin. 

By dint of perseverance and luck, I succeeded in accessing many of these sources — to discover that these were so fragmentary that they depicted only parts of the huge Fort, that too during just short periods of its long existence, and generally from a time when it had already transformed greatly. Many of these sources seemed to take a great deal of artistic license and directly contradicted each other! I also discovered that the reason why my visits to the Fort had left me so confused, was that large swathes of it had been destroyed by the British. But how much and why, was not clearly explained either at the Fort, or in any of the books I had read. 

So the challenge for me was to visualise and reconstruct from a handful of buildings, and from some scattered and contradictory records, how the Fort was lived in, and how it looked — when it was established 350 years ago. 

To give a literary analogy, it was like piecing together an entire story from a few words here-and-there — with a faded and torn translation for reference. In hindsight, I would perhaps describe the entire process as a piece of detection, that actually compared testimonies from different historical records of eye-witness or hearsay accounts. I utilised the remains of the existing original buildings as clues, through techniques of architectural and spatial studies and analysis — to judge which of these testimonies were more correct than others.

This is, in essence what I did, and what I’ve explained in the book. 

And what did I discover about the Fort through this process of research and analysis? Well, the picture that emerged from my study, overset many of my existing notions about ways of living and building —  as well as my ideas of fortresses and palaces. I realised that the Red Fort which James Ferguson, the pioneering British historian had titled ‘The Most Magnificent Palace in the East—perhaps in the world’, was actually a beautifully detailed mini-city. 

As the grand finale to earlier great forts of the Mogul emperors, it contained within it not just palaces but also meticulously planned karkhanas and kitchen-gardens, market-streets and music-chambers, halls and housing-precincts for attendants and soldiers. 

I also understood that the palaces within the Red Fort, which were reached through a succession of gateways leading into larger and ever grander forecourts, were not conventional towering buildings. They were instead a series of glowing single-storey pavilions, strung together with delicate walled screens and arcades — almost like a necklace of pearls. These pavilions were positioned on raised plinths and terraces, each within its own garden or forecourt. On one side, they looked out onto trees, flowers and fountains framed within geometrical baghs; and on the other side, onto the expansive banks and waters of the Yamuna, with green fields stretching beyond into the horizon.

Throughout the day, in a precise routine that combined public duties, ceremonial and administrative functions, private activities and family gatherings, the emperor along with courtiers and officials in attendance, moved in and out of these pavilions, and walled forecourts and gardens. They allowed him and his family to freely imbibe views, colours, scents, and breezes of the outdoors; and simultaneously worked wonderfully well to protect them from unregulated public view. 

The power of the Fort’s design was such that it gave the impression of being very accessible: located as it was right on the river-banks of the Yamuna, and at the public intersection of Shahjahanabad’s main entrance streets which led straight into it through high gateways — while utilising the arrangement of walled forecourts to afford security and privacy to the emperor, to his family, as well as to everyone living and working within the Fort. 

So much so, that it was virtually impossible for anyone to make an unobserved entry or exit into the Fort, especially its inner parts, even with the complicity of the inmates. Francois Bernier, a Frenchman who stayed in Shahjahanabad for six years during Aurangzeb’s reign, records in his memoirs a story about an unfortunate suitor of Princess Roshanara. This suitor entered the inner palace with help from the Princesses’ attendants, but then got hopelessly lost in the maze of the walled forecourts, to be finally discovered by the palace guards!

Today, none of these walled forecourts exist, along with most of their accompanying buildings. Nor do most of the walled gardens. No wonder then, that we cannot make sense of how the Fort functioned and appeared originally.

This is where the book comes in. Apart from tracing the past life of the Fort, it gives suggestions about its future well-being, drawing from my thesis on the Red Fort for my Masters in Architectural Conservation, as well as my research and examination of parts of the Fort not open to the public as a conservation consultant to the ASI. I hope it will help others who may have been mystified by the Fort, to plan how we should be taking care of this unique historical site and to better appreciate its design.

This design responded so intelligently to site-constraints — the Yamuna and the Aravalli outcrops, older buildings and baolis, hillocks and drainage courses — that the huge construction venture of the Fort and of Shahjahanabad was accomplished in just nine years. This is also the reason for the Fort’s unusual plan. Since the Fort’s design made open areas comfortable for daily activities, it reduced the requirement for built-structures, thereby continuing the Indic tradition where buildings were like pavilions and not walled-in structures, but interlinked with open areas to adapt to different seasons and multiple purposes. Its palace-pavilions, entrance-streets, halls of justice, craft-workshops, residences of soldiers, all in close proximity within separate enclosures, housed a remarkable range of activities — in function it would be like the Rashtrapati Bhawan, North/South Blocks, Parliament House, cantonments, Crafts Museum, theatres, etc. spread out across New Delhi.

Built with the active involvement, and skill of an array of craftspeople — calligraphers, carpenters, finial-makers, sculptors, inlayers — led by master-builders and guild-heads, the Fort’s architecture in its details was comparable to the Taj Mahal. Court histories record that in the inaugural celebrations, ‘artisans of wondrous talent and magical skill’ were publicly honoured by Shah Jahan.

Instead of making it an aloof and barred stage-set that continues colonial concepts of keeping people out, while ironically commemorating its memory as a symbol of resistance to British rule, I hope that that the second edition of the book will help us to conserve the spirit of the Red Fort. I hope it will be able to convey how such values of flexibility, versatility, frugality, and inclusiveness directed the Fort’s creation and functioning. And I hope that we will not forget these values and incorporate them in our buildings today, and build imagination and empathy. 

Let me end with the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, that summons up the enduring memory of the Red Fort and the Taj Mahal: originally in Bengali and here, through my imperfect translation, in English.

You are gone today, Emperor;

Your empire like a dream has flown. 

In pieces lies your throne; 

Your soldiers, whose marching feet 

Made the earth ring and beat,

Their memory carried on the wind 

Flies with the dust of Delhi’s streets. 

Within your walls are songs no more;

With the Yamuna no longer does the naubat roar; 

The sound of the anklets your perfect women once wore 

Dies away with the crickets’ drones,

In the corners of your broken palaces 

As the night-sky mourns.

Even so, your messenger ever high,

Unsoiled, untiring,

Above the ruins of empires rising, 

Above the turn of life and death, 

Through time and after in a breath

Of bereavement infinite

Avers without respite 

“Beloved, I have not forgotten, nor will I.”

‘Unfolding The Cosmos’

 ‘Unfolding The Cosmos’

The Significance of History — and of Architecture as its Primary Source 

The Case of the Red Fort

Anisha Shekhar Mukherji

Lecture for Frontiers of History: 8 December 2023

To examine the significance of history and the role of architecture as one of its primary sources — let me first locate our larger context in the world, with the help of a quote from a different discipline. The quantum physicist, Carlo Rovelli, in his book, The Order of Time, explains that the second principle of thermodynamics, which provides the mathematical definition of the variation of entropy of a body, 'is the only equation of fundamental physics that knows any difference between past and future. The only one that speaks of the flowing of time.’ He goes on to say: 

’the growth of entropy distinguishes the past from the future for us and leads to the unfolding of the cosmos. It determines the existence of traces, residues and memories of the past. We human beings are an effect of this great history of the increase of entropy, held together by the memory that is enabled by these traces.’

This significance of history that ‘we are an effect of and that we can be held together by’, is what I will speak about today and the memories that determine how we see history. These are recorded in myriad ways as texts, drawings, pictures, sculpture, architecture. But physicists and philosophers remind us that by the time some sight or sound travels to our senses, it is already past: however infinitesimally small that time may be. Taken in this literal sense, no event and its recording can ever be simultaneous or present in the same moment — and each is a memory.

Even if we disregard the implications of such minute allocations of time, our knowledge of events — through records made by someone present at a particular time in the past —are re-presentations in another way. They are impressions filtered by not just the organs of perception, but also by the abilities and intentions of those who make them. We know this not just from abstract texts, or even from the exciting genre of crime fiction where the unravelling of the mystery depends on the detective ploughing through testimonies of different ‘witnesses’ to the crime, but also from daily experience. No two versions in newspaper reports of an event, presented by two different people even if observed at the same time, will be identical. They can, in fact, be very dissimilar. What we may call the ‘Rashoman Effect’ that Akira Kurosawa demonstrates for us so brilliantly and disturbingly in his film. Memory therefore, alters both perception and recollection.

Architecture as a Primary Source of History

If all records are secondary sources, why do I claim that architecture can be read as a primary source? Indeed, in the conventional view architecture is not generally considered a primary source in history. Yet architecture (along with archaeology) perhaps constitutes the only record that we can all come close to perceiving in a primary way. Less easy to dislocate as compared to archaeological remains, the record of historic architecture differs from all others in that we can experience it through not just one but practically all our physical senses. We can view and touch it, be enclosed and encompassed in it, hear the sound of our voices and footsteps as we walk within and around it — in similar even if not in exactly the same ways as did those who created and inhabited it. 

In other words, we can interact in various ways and multiple levels with architecture — which is not just a setting or record of events, but the event itself. Even when there are no stated objectives of memorialising, we can trace in the way architecture is built, lived in, and transformed: what people held important; what they remembered or wished to remember; what were their craft, technology or management skills. Architecture is thus one of the most direct manifestation of memories that govern our individual and larger identities, and also a manifestation of multiple knowledge-systems comprising cultural, social, economic and technological history.

The Significance of History

Within this universality of experience that architecture offers, it would be perhaps natural to assumed that architects are particularly equipped to read the historical information embedded in it — formally trained as they are in representative methods of drawings, plans, maps and models to visualise built-form; and to co-relate these representations into actual built spaces.

Despite this, architects themselves do not generally view architecture as a primary source of history! Indeed, history is considered inimical to creativity in the modernist tradition — a rather extreme reaction to the restrictions imposed by history when it is limited to just a style-palette. The sidelining of history from mainstream architecture, initiated by the German-American architect Walter Gropius (one of the pioneers of modernist design) has persisted beyond his time and beyond Europe and America. Delinked from the logic of construction and spatial function, architectural history is taught today as compartmentalised lectures in Schools of Architecture, and divided into periods and styles. By isolating architectural history in this way, we greatly reduce its potential to trace what human beings are ‘an effect of, and are held together by’. 

So, how can we read this primary resource such that we do not just look at it from the point of view of ‘styles’, and instead as a source to inform creative and beneficent living practices? I will explore this general question through the specific example of what has been variously known as: the Qila-e-Mubarak, Lal Haveli, Red Fort, Dilli ka Lal Qila etc. This Fort is a particularly good case study given its size and complexity, the extreme extent of its transformation, and the very few traces that remain of its original architecture. From the epithet of ‘The Most Magnificent Palace in the East’ by James Fergusson, to the brusque title of ‘The Fort’ in British official records after 1857, to its appellation of “Fortress of Freedom’ after Independence, these different names reflect the different associations of this iconic World Heritage Site and its seminal role in formulating identities in the subcontinent. I will also, within the constraints of the time we have today, touch upon how far its representations match its reality and how it illustrates political and social history.

Reading the Red Fort: What is — and What may have been

Though its towering walls and powerful gateways loom large on our cityscape, only about 10 percent of the structures from the Red Fort’s establishment remain today. When I first visited the Fort, incoherent as its interior seemed to be, I could — like everyone who visits it — experience the volumes and forms of its few Mughal buildings; their delicate sophistication; the lightness with which they enclosed space. At the same time, I could read the absence, albeit in a confused way, of what was not there: from my memory of what ought to be attributes of Mughal architecture, and from my professional training about what a place that accommodated the functions of life, ought to be.

It was difficult to reconcile these disconnected Mughal structures with the regal splendour and other magnificent acts of patronage associated with Shah Jahan. It was also impossible to understand how he or anyone else could have lived in it — which was the main question that triggered my research. I could also tell that the British barracks were later intrusions, even though there was no information on site to help realise how much of the Fort was destroyed after 1857. Thus, the primary record of the Fort yielded clues to what it was, as well as what it may have been. Even the absence of certain architectural features on site furthered my understanding. The realisation that there were missing-bits, directed my search to other sources.

To give an analogy from literature, the Fort may be likened to a large book, whose seemingly intact hard-bound cover is moth-eaten around the edges. On turning the cover, we discover that most pages are missing. In the few pages that remain, the text has been so erased that only some scattered words are visible: in a script that is partially legible, and overlaid in a different language. How do we read such an incomplete manuscript? This is the challenge posed by the erasure and reordering of so much of the primary record of the iconic Red Fort. To continue the analogy: it is evident that first we must glean what we can from the original script, to gauge the quality of language used and understand its content. The original script of the Fort consists of the structures and spaces that date from its establishment. And this is what we have to read through a scrutiny of its tangible forms and of the systems implicit in these forms.

These are some of the geometrical, spatial and proportional studies of the Red Fort that helped me to understanding this primary record. I could, through these studies uncover the relationship between what remained of extant Mughal structures on site, and ‘fill in the gaps’ to surmise where the missing Mughal structures may have existed in the original sequence of buildings. Apart from ‘predicting’ the location of missing Mughal buildings, these exercises helped me to correlate information from its different sources. And to spot the significance of hitherto unrecognised records — such as a dusty plan in the ASI archives! Though not as detailed as some other maps, this plan is invaluable in that it contains measured outlines of the original components in the Fort’s design that the British intended to demolish. It was also due to examination of the architectural remains and correlating them with the emperor’s daily schedule of activities, that I figured out a very interesting aspect of the Fort’s use: how specific ‘domains’ were accessible to only certain occupants or visitors, and thus virtually 'invisible’ to others. This insight into the way the Fort functioned and appeared was confirmed by this Plan of the Fort in the National Archives, drawn by Ensign Peter Lawtie in 1812 — which only plots the areas that Lawtie was presumably allowed to enter. He had no access to the rest of the Fort, and so, left it as a blank!

The geometrical, spatial and functional analysis also directed my attention to other remains on site — such as a fragment at the plinth level between the Moti Masjid and the Bhadon pavilion. This marks the position of the wall between the imperial Hayat Baksh garden and Diwan-i-Khas Forecourt. It helps to corroborate information in archival maps; and gives evidence of the limits of the Diwan-i-Khas Forecourt. Thus, the traces of the Mughal buildings in the Fort when read appropriately, can convey lessons in the usage of space, track positions or proportions of missing built-structures, and serve as tools to gauge the veracity of other sources.

Whose Perspective

If you’ll forgive the pun, I’d like to illustrate this further through some drawings of the Fort by British artists in the mid-19^th century, which are supposed to be based on actual site-observation. They show the Fort from the ridge across and beyond the river, drawn during or just before the momentous events of 1857, which saw scenes of intense battle in and around Shahjahanabad. 

As we know, the Red Fort’s walls and buildings suffered extensive damage by shelling in 1857, and unabashed looting and destruction after the British forces moved into the Fort, the symbolic seat of the Mughal empire. We also know that as a consequence of the palace demolition order carried out in 1863, most of the structures within it, and around its boundary walls upto a distance of 500 yards, were ordered to be reduced to rubble. On the face of it, these drawings, showing as they do, a complete and unbroken Fort and adjacencies drawn realistically according to the rules of perspective, seem invaluable in re-constructing its reality just before its large-scale destruction and re-modelling by the British. But how true to reality are these representations?

A comparison with existing Mughal buildings in the Fort — as well as with other drawings and descriptions — reveals that these views of ‘Delhi and its surrounding countryside’ substantially re-order the configuration of the Red Fort’s built-form. Firstly, they mis-represent its outer profile, its neighbourhood, and other parts of Shahjahanabad. Secondly, they completely eliminate the numerous pavilions, forecourts, gateways, enclosed gardens and arcades within the Red Fort. Thirdly, they reduce the interior of the Fort to a couple of towering buildings, depicted within an open area entered through a wide driveway flanked by trees and shrubbery. It is not a record of what really existed, but an Orientalised image of a stately European or English home.

Despite this, the preface to an official publication of the Victoria Memorial Hall at Kolkata containing this and similar artworks by European artists, urges us to see these as ‘study-based endeavours in which no room is left for the imagination’. We are told that ‘these paintings reflected images as in a mirror’ whose ‘credibility and fidelity remain above board’. Such acceptance of so-called ‘eye-witness’ records, without comparing them with the primary record of what they purport to depict, leads us twice astray. First, it makes us see in them the ‘true’ reality of what existed. Secondly, it makes us see in them the standard image of important architecture. And therefore, the desirable template for making architecture even in our times.

The rendering of the Red Fort into re-presentations by British artists would have of course, been affected by memories of grand edifices in their own culture. But apart from their individual skills as well as expectations of an imperial residence, these artists were also recording for viewers in Europe, a simplistic image of an unfamiliar architecture seen as exotic and effete. Since access to all parts of the Fort was not possible, they depicted the Fort not as it was, but as they could make sense of it. Since its many forecourts, enclosed gardens, pavilions and verandahs were not part of their way of life, they did not perceive their significance and simply omitted to draw them!

Many Europeans also stereotyped Indian rulers as decadent despots, and visualised the Red Fort as a den of vice. For instance, John Dryden, considered one of the greatest English poets of the 17th century, themed one of his most successful plays on Shah Jahan’s Court, which he filled with intrigue, improper amour and many imaginary characters. Dryden, poet laureate in 1668 CE, was also appointed royal historiographer of England in 1670. His play Aurangzebe, (incidentally written when Aurangzeb was still ruling) was first staged in November 1675 for the King of England. That it continues to be described as ‘the last and most intelligent example of the genre’ of a heroic play — shows us that literary ability can be confused with historical authenticity. And how much such representations effect us, can be seen in the view that many of us continue to harbour of the Mughal rulers as being tyrannical or decadent — or both.

The Distortion of Memories 

Along with the inherent limitation of memory unconsciously altering perception in written or drawn records, a particular memory may be deliberately reinforced to control the narrative of an event. For instance, the formulation and presentation of records of the Fort after 1857, were intended to  memorialise the British version and justify their violence towards the people and ruler of Shahjahanabad. This photograph by Felice Beato of the Forecourt of the Naqqar Khana in the Red Fort, is captioned: ‘Inner Gateway of Palace, with the tree under which the Christians were massacred’. As Narayani Gupta notes: ‘The account of this cowardly deed was to be so highly exaggerated that, when the British forces captured Delhi in September 1857, many of them slaughtered children and women in what they thought was retribution’. The photograph focuses on this much recounted tragic episode both in its visual composition and the wording of its caption. Though it is an invaluable record of the enclosing arcades of the Naqqar Khana Forecourt which were demolished by the British, this often escapes attention since the Naqqar Khana is made to recede into the background and reduced to the ambiguity of the ‘Inner Gateway of Palace’.

This visual record in its mournful and partial representation, also gives no indication of the dramatic spatial and functional quality of the Naqqar Khana Forecourt, through which passed ambassadors and noblemen, artisans and attendants, ministers and musicians. This Forecourt, provided the necessary formal foreground to the Naqqar Khana, and was of a size and shape that could accommodate a great number of people without crowding. It allowed circulation and active movement as well as space to pause: where different people could come together to work, wait, reflect, and perhaps rediscover, in the words of the Lebanese-French author Amin Malouf, “a certain kinship” with their fellow human beings.

Literary records

We have looked at a few instances of visual records dating from 200 years after the Fort’s establishment. What of literary records? Such sources have a limitation in that they refract the three-dimensional experience of architecture into words. This limitation is compounded for such a huge complex as the Red Fort. If we consider the Badshahnama, the official court-history of Shah Jahan, it covers the founding and early years of the Red Fort and describes the decoration, dimensions, and materials of many buildings. But it does not convey the spatial quality of the Fort, which was an elegant permutation of inter-linked built and open space. Neither does it record all parts of the Red Fort. It is concerned mainly with the formal entrance sequences and some of the eastern parts (what I term the Public Imperial Domain and the Private Imperial domain in my analysis of the Fort). The areas where the attendants and soldiers lived or worked, which were also integral to the essential attribute of the Red Fort as a city-within-a-city, are not referred to in the Badshahnama.

Neither is it likely that Abdul Ahmed Lahori — chosen after a succession of writers as the author of the Badshahnama (or Muhammad Waris, who co-authored the last volume of the Badshahnama) could have personally observed everything covering the nine years from the commencement of the Fort to its inauguration. Details cited in the Badshahnama would have been necessarily based on accounts by a great number of individuals, who supervised or participated in different parts of its construction or upkeep for varying lengths of time, before being transferred to other posts. In other words, the official record of the founding and original form of the Fort has many ‘missing bits’. We deduce the existence of these missing bits and understand their diverse complexity from remains on site, drawings, other texts, etc. What this also tells us, is that rarely is a record complete in itself. It is by looking at multiple frames of reference, and most importantly by revisiting the primary record of what remains on ground — that we come close to a more complete picture of what we are trying to understand.

So, What does the Fort tell us?

Let me, therefore return to this primary record to highlight the significant meanings that I have derived of its history. In my book The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad, I examine extant buildings and spaces to understand the Fort’s original spatial, functional and architectural attributes, and how and why these have transformed through the 350 odd years of its existence. This examination, in conjunction with other sources ranging from measured-drawings to maps and miniature paintings, revealed to me that the Red Fort was activated by a true spirit of conservation. The very choice of architectural components — forecourts, pavilions, halls, verandahs, enclosed gardens — and their provision throughout the Fort, not only enlarged the perception of available space — where views, sights, and sound flowed between inside and outside — but also made open areas comfortable for daily activities, so that the number and size of built structures were reduced. Such an expression of architecture can be viewed as the grand finale of the Indic tradition, where buildings were not used as sealed objects, but interlinked with open areas to be permeable and efficient; and to be adaptive to different seasons and used by a wide variety of people.

The Fort as a whole, too was devised for multiple purposes. Formal entrance-streets, halls of justice, workshops, kitchen gardens, elephant stables, residences of soldiers, were lodged in close proximity within their own enclosing walls. These accommodated a huge number of activities of different groups — even in areas such as the imperial pavilions. They also allowed control over entrance or exit — as the story of one of Princess Roshanara’s unfortunate suitors who got lost in the maze of these walled forecourts reveals! Both open and covered space were formulated with great intelligence, to have decorative and functional features. Buildings within and around gardens and forecourts enhanced geometry and gave shade; open spaces yielded verdure, fruit, vegetables and herbs; water channels irrigated as well as cooled the gardens. The Fort was configured to respect site-constraints and existing built- and natural-structures — such as the Yamuna, the Aravallis, the older Salimgarh Fort, baolis, hillocks, water-systems. These were not demolished or disturbed, but instead incorporated into the formal layout of the Fort and its city, so that they enhanced both spatial experience and efficient functioning. 

Even within a monarchical set up, in a decentralised process of design, construction, and use, master-builders and guild-heads from all parts of the imperial dominions in tandem with technicians and official, led teams of calligraphers, garden-designers, carpenters, dome-builders, finial-makers, masons, stone-cutters, sculptors, inlayers — s. Sizes, motifs or details of buildings were not expected to be exact replicas, nor made to follow rigid grid-modules. They were instead based on interlinked systems of proportions that encouraged design-participation of even masons and stone-workers, all of whom could then devise details on site within a structured template and location of functions. And all of whose contributions were rewarded and publicly acknowledged.

Architecture activated by conservation and inclusion 

How we remember and re-present the Fort, reflects what we are. It is particularly important to dwell on this today, as we reinforce the appearance and use of the Fort set forth during its colonial occupation — even as we occasionally use it as a stage-set for celebrations that ironically seek to commemorate its memory as a symbol of resistance to British rule. It is now an aloof and barred space, continuing colonial concepts of keeping people out. Its specific quality of designing open space as an adjunct of architecture so that buildings were flexible and versatile, as well as the implicit qualities of frugality and inclusion that were central to its creation and functioning, are ignored. It is in our individual and collective interest to remember and comprehend these, to fire our imagination and empathy — as in the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, originally in Bengali and here, through my imperfect translation, in English.

You have gone away

Emperor, today;

Your empire like a dream has flown. 

In pieces lies your throne; 

Your soldiers, whose marching feet 

Made the earth ring and beat,

Their memory carried on the wind today  

Flies after the dust of Delhi’s streets. 

Within your walls are songs no more;

With the Yamuna no longer does the naubat roar; 

The sound of the anklets your perfect women once wore 

Dies away with the crickets’ drones,

In the corners of your broken palaces 

As the night-sky mourns.

Even so, your messenger ever high,

Unsoiled, untiring,

Above the ruins of empires rising, 

Above the turn of life and death, 

Through time and after in a breath

Of bereavement infinite

Avers without respite 

“Beloved, I have not forgotten, nor will I.”

The long overdue second edition of the Red Fort book to be published soon by Westland, I hope will enable all of us too, to not forget. And to discover through the diverse, rich and varied memories and knowledge-systems embodied in the Fort, the very ‘unfolding of the cosmos’, as it were.

Beauty in Architecture -- and Design

 Text of the Talk presented at the

 

Kurula Varkey Design Forum 2023 

as part of De-Talks (panellist presentations) on 12 August 2023

To talk about beauty in architecture, we need to clarify what we mean by beauty. So I’m going to begin with a few pictures of architecture touted as the most beautiful in the world. However, the cliche that ‘beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder’ is, like most cliches, true. Even the Taj Mahal has its detractors — amongst architects, most prominently Edwin Lutyens. But, leaving the personal angle aside, what does beauty mean in the cultural context we inhabit? Answering this involves some generalisation, since cultural context is not a monolith. Within this generalisation, I find Rajendra Chettiarthodi’s notes about ‘The Concept of Beauty in Indian tradition’ worth quoting. He observes, ‘While western aestheticians equated beauty with symmetry and similar mathematical properties, Indian thinkers did not try to locate it in such clearly defined objective factors. Their concept of beauty had always some reference to the experience generated by the beautiful’. He goes on to quote the poet Magha: ‘That which appears anew is the nature of the beautiful,’ and Jagannath Pandita that ‘a beautiful object creates in us a form of knowledge, which gives rise to a supra-mundane form of bliss’. Supra-mundane means transcending or superior to the physical world. This meaning of beauty is thus, linked with experience of knowledge and blissful discovery. 

In architecture, such experience ought to be determined by function. But, does it? For instance, the famous engineer Ove Arup, termed the Sydney Opera House (whose function is evident in its title) ‘a millstone around our neck, since its spatial and structural planning had to be entirely reconfigured to try to make it work properly, with a final cost fourteen times the original estimate — as Malcolm Millais reveals in his book, Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture. We’d all agree, I think that however arresting the forms, if a building does not function properly, it cannot give an experience of ‘knowledge or blissful discovery’. As for the recently completed Bharat Mandapam in Delhi, praised as an ‘architectural marvel’ by Anand Mahindra, its form (as shared by the project director), was driven by ‘the scale of the project’, ‘the footfall,’ and the fact that they ’wanted it to be an icon for modern India’. The meaning of icon is ‘something regarded as a representative symbol or as worthy of veneration, but many of the buildings we label iconic today do not fulfil that meaning. It is with reference to the almost exclusive association of beauty with the iconic, which we currently interpret as the ‘largest, tallest, weirdest’ — rather than as an experience worthy of reverence, that the interviewer asks: ‘If one were to pause and reflect on buildings that made one truly happy, at peace…and elevated our thoughts to give them meaning, what would those spaces be?’

To explore what those spaces can be, we can turn to the Red Fort, the climax of imperial Mughal forts. Celebrated for its beauty, and a symbol of the Mughal empire and independent India, the Fort is iconic in the actual meaning of the word. Its overall design efficiently responded to site constraints and satisfied specific official, public, and private functions; its individual parts such as the Diwan-i-Am — the climax of the ceremonial axis from Shahjahanabad into the presence of the Emperor — were evolved representations of the traditional typology of the mandapam (or pavilion) set within forecourts. The Fort provided security for the emperor, and ease of use for him and for everyone else, along with a striking aesthetic quality. Similarly, the yantras of the Jantar Mantar, with their dramatic sculpturesque forms, detail, and size — some as large as seven-storey buildings — built to observe celestial objects and devised for precision of measurement by the human eye, have evoked wonder and self-discovery even in visitors unfamiliar with Indian astronomy.

Leaving the iconic aside, what about beauty in everyday architecture today? Well, the function of architecture is now generally reduced to programme-specifics. Private agencies and government organisations cite FSI, covered area, density, and facilities of shopping or gymming, as development criteria of housing colonies, rather than fundamental functions of houses as places of sanctuary; of shelter, safety and comfort. That is why we have so many concrete boxes masquerading as houses. These become ovens in the summers, ice-boxes in the winters, leak in the rains, and collapse suddenly — neither beautiful in experience nor appearance. As for schools, these are places to awaken the mind, but do they architecturally aid that function? The celebrated author, Shivani, who came to study at ShantiNiketan in Bengal from Kumaon in the Central Himalayas, recollects:

“Our classes were not closed in within walls that shut out the outer world, nor did they have ceilings to close our minds. As we sat under the canopy of the Ashram’s trees, the blue sky spread over us as far as we could see…If our fingers ached after writing, we were free to put down our pens and stroll away to hear the Santhal tribals who often passed the Ashram’s fields as they went about their work, singing or playing a haunting melody on a flute…The cooing doves and pigeons came to entertain us and helped us learn the dates of the three battles of Panipat so painlessly that they have remained etched in our minds forever. Like scores of students before and after us, we also struggled with Akbar’s religious policy and Lord Bentinck’s administrative reforms, yet what else was it but the magic of the Ashram that these never became a tiresome burden?”

I don’t know how many of you found school tiresome; but I don’t remember the architecture of the nine different schools I attended, as being particularly beautiful, or giving the opportunity to gaze at trees, birds and squirrels! Such experiences, along with fresh air and natural light, help both the mind and the body; yet they are rarely integrated in architecture — even that of designated places of healing. Thus, the predominant function of hospitals today is to provide facilities for professional medical services; their design determinants are the number of beds, parking, rooms, etc. The architecture of one of the premier hospitals in India, AIIMS in Delhi, gives out a bleak rather than a reassuring vibe: while fancy hospitals with reflective glass and plush finishes, are also intimidating in their scale and impersonality. In contrast, even the process of choosing a building-site in the Indian tradition, is linked to an ideal of well-being for everybody, including the Earth we build upon, through a process of identifying site lakshana or characteristics of shape, odour, adjacencies, existing plantation, texture and taste of the soil!

Today, the rule rather than the exception, is that architecture is either directed by whimsy equated to beauty; or by market trends and commercial constraints. And the process of architectural design reduces function primarily to efficiency of plans, even though the plan is merely an abstraction and simplification; part of the industrial modernist world-view. In pre-industrial methods of building, ideas of function — and beauty — were part of the visual lexicon of a region, with little need for communicating that image through voluminous drawings. This made negotiations between client and builder, as between function and aesthetic, fluid and creative. Today, along with the reduction of function, there is also confusion about aesthetic norms, because we are trained in the modernist credo to ‘make it new? and ‘do away with ornament’! Though we may not agree with Le Corbusier — an important figure for architects worldwide — that: ‘Decoration…is suited to simple races, peasants and savages’, most architects are wary of ornamentation. Yet, as we see in the Diwan-i-Am and other parts of the Red Fort, detailing and decoration can contribute as much to spatial experience as light and volume, while also expressing structural elements. But our architectural instruction does not involve sustained training in construction, or enough knowledge of materials like wood, mud, or stone. So, there is a reduced ability to deal with technical, spatial and material function, coupled with a reductive comprehension of function itself. Much of architecture today is ‘un-beautiful’ because it is functional in a reductive way, or dysfunctional.

Fundamentally, thus, there is no contradiction between pragmatic needs and aesthetic concerns of creating space. Architecture needs to do both. It did so in the main, before the artificial split between function and beauty, which is the outcome of compartmentalising life into separate categories of work vs leisure, quantity vs quality, mundane vs spiritual. If we consider function in its complete sense: social, technical, ecological; and empathetic and satisfying all the senses, we would automatically provide for aesthetic qualities of light, texture, proportion, detail and spatial comfort. In conclusion, I’d like to end with an image which shows clearly how embodied beauty of functional values and manifested beauty of ornament, structure, and material, cannot be separated — and can be achieved in any domain of design.