The Cultural Vista

(written May 2018)

 

Yesterday I spent an afternoon at the (British) National Portrait Gallery just off Trafalgar Square and St-Martin-in-the-Fields.  A vast collection of paintings of royalty, nobility and their hangers-on.  Vile creatures, bold creatures, some ugly and some surprisingly handsome (Milton!)  The collection abounded with bounders and adventurers who had built the empire.  Many of those whose faces we saw hanging there had lost their heads. Literally. 

 

And then there was the unabashed, unapologetic portrayal of the colonists as heroes.  Clive, Wellington, the whole lot of folks whom we would arraign as war criminals today.

 

But the more redeeming part of the gallery was the large number of portraits of poets, painters, artists and scientists.  The people who made the British empire much more richer than a Brutish Empire.  

 

Wandering around the gallery, I was reminded of my father’s dream for the Central Vista in Delhi.  I think this idea had been in his head ever since the 50s, when he first visited Washington DC: after all the Vista is modelled after Pierre (Peter) Charles L'Enfant’s plan for the Mall there.   

 

From what I recall, his vision grew out of a concept where the cultural heart of the nation grew around the intersection of the Raj Path and Jan Path down to India Gate.  Now that the new republic had democratised the two roads from being King’s Way and Queen’s Way (*),  and the (roughly west-side) area from Jan Path up to Rashtrapati Bhavan ceded to the political life of the nation, the part (roughly) to the east  could be devoted to the Cultural Nation.  

 

The National Museum had already come up on Janpath, next to the Archaeological Survey, and from the 70s and well into the 80s, it was to grow under the vision of scholars such as Sivaramakrishnan and dynamos such as Laxmi Sihare.  Nonetheless he chafed under the mealy objections of bureaucrats unwilling to give more space to a much larger museum, such as the one that Sihare had envisaged.  

 

On the other side of Raj Path, the National Archives had long been established, and the new parliament libraries served to record the political developments of our democracy.

 

My father saw the C-Hexagon as the natural location for a series of museums for the arts and sciences.  The buildings were palaces of the princely kingdoms, and could be repurposed.  Jaipur House had already become the National Gallery for Modern Art, though the gallery space would soon clearly become inadequate.  While the buildings carried the legacy of the princely states, their very names could serve to highlight the notion that this was a national project: Hyderabad, Patiala, Jaipur, Bikaner,...

 

He was for pulling down the unsightly little bungalows in Prince’s Park and reclaiming the ugly barracks of Raksha Bhawan to develop a National Portrait Gallery comprising mainly photographs and a few selected paintings focussing on the great singers, artists, scholars, writers (with a slightly less important but unavoidable space devoted to politicians).  On other side, he saw the need for a National Landscape Gallery to document the extraordinary variety and beauty of the land and sea of India.  The defence services of course were loth to give up any land.

 

My father had earlier influenced the inclusion of a larger set of exhibits documenting the various strands of the Freedom movement (from the 1750s to 1948) in Gandhi Smriti, but that exhibit had been dismantled and destroyed at the insistence of the Gandhians (during Morarji-bhai’s tenure as PM) who wanted it to be exclusively a museum to Gandhi. (The space has been occupied by tawdry tableaux and ersatz objects).  The corresponding scholarly record in documents about the freedom movement fortunately survived in the Nehru Memorial Library (despite efforts to make it exclusively a mausoleum to Nehru).  However,   this is now under severe threat, but, hell, from the Other Side. 

 

He also talked of  the need for National Centres for the Performing Arts (Dance, Music and Drama)  off the central vista, each with a carefully designed auditorium suited for the particular art forms -- apart from NCPA in Bombay -- and distinct from the various auditoriums around Mandi House.   The auditorium at Siri Fort, though, was to him an exemplar of what an auditorium should not be -- poor acoustics (I remarked how one could hear distinct echoes when Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic played there), and a relatively small lobby, where the entire audience could not be accommodated without jostling.  And the preposterous positioning of the lavatories. 

 

In the 80s and early 90s, my father got to see part of his vision realised.  He was involved in a very intense way in the setting up of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts.  This came up on the northern side of the Central Vista, and was meant to house all the folk arts, both visual and performance, as well as our rich linguistic heritage. Kapila Vatsyayan has done a stellar job in giving this project a scholarly vision, although this enterprise suffered a rather rude disruption in the late 90s-early 2000s.   The building, a large and expensive project, when it did come up disappointed him for the sheer lack of large exhibition space.   My father had worked with Charles and Ray Eames, and from them had learnt the importance of space and light in exhibitions and for the movement of people through the them. 

 

There is a small group of people who want to preserve the Lutyens Bungalow Zone seeing it as a buffer against ugly modernity. I think my father concurred only slightly with them... he did not favour “a more efficient use of the space” for large office buildings or sarkari housing, but did not think that the bungalows had any intrinsic architectural value.  This view of his probably gained even greater resonance when he was delving through the papers of Edwin Lutyens when writing a book about the Rashtrapati Bhavan
(Rashtrapati Bhavan: The Story of the President's House, Publications Division), where he found that Lutyens in fact detested bungalows and PWD construction, and use to refer to them as “Bungle-Oh”.

 

(*) A friend of mine waggishly remarks that it is somehow apposite that Rajpath and  Janpath are forever at cross purposes.