Reimagining New Delhi’s Central Vista, Part II
This is the second article in a series of two. Click here to read the first.
New Delhi’s central vista has long embodied a range of ideas about India’s identity and nationhood. In the first article in this series, I explored the vista’s original planning and design by the British in the 1910s, as well as plans by the current Government of India to restore the site to its original imperial ethos. In this article, I turn to post-independence era, when British architect Gordon Cullen suggested a radically different direction that he believed better squared with the democratic norms of the new state.
When Cullen first came to Delhi in 1959, as a consultant to the Ford Foundation and India’s Town Planning Organization, his initial reaction to the vista was that it should stay, more or less, as Edwin Lutyens had originally designed it. Cullen was a noted British muralist, artist, and urban planner who had worked on the post-war reconstruction of Liverpool and Peterborough. Cullen was clearly impressed by the vista, calling it “extraordinary.” He wrote in his diary: “An axis flung down on the great dusty plain . . . all India lies inside the axis against the sun, in the haze and dust. [It] should never be built up.”[1] Indeed, it was his understanding that of all the elements of the city, it was the vista alone that was to remain “inviolate;” it was not to be “hemmed in.”
Cullen would later describe New Delhi’s vista in his influential book Townscape as a perfect, even exemplary, visual sequence: a procession of views that brought a kind of drama to the visitor’s experience of place. This is Cullen’s idea of “serial vision,” and suggests the importance he placed on visual experience and the emotional impact of a city’s built form. The Delhi vista, Cullen wrote, and in particular the approach towards Rashtrapati Bhavan from the east, embodied a “skillful relationship” between a “here” and a “there.” As one approached the incline between the secretariat buildings, the dome of the Rashtrapati Bhavan slowly disappeared, only to be made visible again as one climbed the hill. But even then, he wrote, the resolution is withheld by the iron screen that isolates Rashtrapati Bhavan from the viewer. It was not unlike a mystery, he said, a withholding of the sequence’s ultimate culmination.[2]
Figure 1. Gordon Cullen’s visual sequence for the New Delhi vista, adapted by Michael S. Dodson from an illustration in The Ninth Delhi (1961).
As Cullen spent more time in Delhi, however, and more time working with the Indian and international group charged with planning in Delhi, he ultimately changed his views about the function that the vista should serve. Towards the end of 1959, Cullen created vivid, and inventive, re-imaginings of the vista at the behest of the Ford Foundation that moved away from notions of artistic beauty-as-sovereignty and the personal experiences of the self-declared “master race” (that is, of the British architects of New Delhi). Rather, Cullen viewed the city as a site that should embody a democratic sovereignty and promote human sociability. To achieve this, he favored adding density to New Delhi and paying a strict attention to how relationships were built through the vista itself to the rest of the city.
Cullen, like many of his contemporaries, worried that the approach recommended in 1957 by the city’s new master plan would end up exacerbating Delhi’s problems by creating low– and medium-density sprawl, from Shahjahanabad in the north to the satellites of Gurgaon and Faridabad to the south and east. Such decentralization would ultimately leave Delhi uninspiring to its inhabitants, Cullen argued, without sufficient drama and intensity of interaction.
In particular, Cullen warned against what was already happening in the late 1950s, namely, the creation of a series of relatively squat government buildings along the axis, ranging from west to east. This over-reliance on the axis, he thought, together with low densities and single-use zoning, was insufficient to enliven the space: “an axis is not an alternative for invention,” he said. What you get instead is “just a big avenue, rather prosaic and stuffy.” [3]
Figure 2. Gordon Cullen’s fear was that buildings would spread from west to east along the vista. Adapted by the Michael S. Dodson from an illustration in The Ninth Delhi (1961).
The problem with the postcolonial vista in his view was how to weave density and diversity into its “heroic pattern”—as fitting to a democracy—without making it a “colossal bore.” Cullen’s solution resided, firstly, in dividing the vista into two unequal, contrasting parts: the “here” of the government complex to the west, and the “there” of the landscaped areas to the east. Secondly, from these portions of the vista Cullen imagined the development of contrasting relationships with the city beyond. At the western end, the “metropolitan locality” would engender an “inward thrust” of relationships, while in the “landscaped locality” of the east those relationships would take on an “outward thrust.”
In practice, what he meant was that the parkland to the east should revert to a more “human scale;” a place for leisure, a quiet stroll with family, and contemplation that would draw people in from surrounding residential neighborhoods. This green space would then act as a kind of foil to the metropolitan locale, itself centered on the two secretariats. Here the “inward thrust” would be produced by the unification of Lutyens’ and Herbert Baker’s buildings, the offices behind on Parliament Street, and a series of new high-rise structures placed in between.
Figure 3. Gordon Cullen’s spatial relationships for the vista. Adapted by the Michael S. Dodson from an illustration in The Ninth Delhi (1961).
Importantly, what Cullen hoped to achieve here was the transformation of a “government enclave” into a “metropolitan enclave” that was better integrated into the city as a whole. Cullen’s reimagined vista would no longer cut Delhi into half—one half above, and one half below—but make the vista an integral part of the city’s structure; “enfolded” in effect, into its patterns of movement and everyday life. [4]
Figure 4. Cullen’s illustration of a high-rise tower adjacent the secretariat’s south block. From Gordon Cullen, The Ninth Delhi (1961).
Cullen felt that the secretariats themselves were not sacrosanct; a red sandstone plinth, he suggested, could serve to unify any new buildings. It was “a creator of spaces and enclosures and any building erected on the plinth will immediately be in relation to the original pavilion,” Cullen argued. He also advocated for the addition of high-rises because such structures would bring density and vibrancy. Moreover, tall buildings with different kinds of exterior textures might create a new form of drama for the whole of the metropolitan core through the “interplay of light and shade.” This is without doubt the most visually striking aspect of Cullen’s plans: Brutalist towers looming over the secretariats.
Cullen did not want to make a mockery of Lutyens’ and Baker’s designs. But it is also clear that he didn’t want to just repeat them down the vista. Cullen’s reimaging of the metropolitan core would have rendered the secretariats something akin to St Paul’s in London: revered monuments of another era. In his words, if the secretariats were a harmonic chord, his plans for the vista’s redevelopment would create a change of key, opening up “a new movement in the creation of a city.”[5]
Figure 5. Cullen’s illustration of a pedestrian plaza near India’s parliament building. From Gordon Cullen, The Ninth Delhi (1961).
When Cullen’s ideas for the vista were published in 1961, they did not constitute a formal part of the new Delhi Master Plan. Instead, they were published separately in a stand-alone volume, entitled The Ninth Delhi, introduced by G. P. Mukharji, the chairman of the Town Planning Organization. Mukharji pointed to the “thought-provoking” nature of Cullen’s work while also noting unequivocally that Cullen’s views “do not represent the views of the Town Planning Organization.” This, in itself, is a curious statement because at least some of Cullen’s work did make its way into the plan, including a design for a civic center along Asif Ali Road intended to better unite, for the first time, the old city of Shahjahanabad with New Delhi.[6] It appears, rather, that Delhi’s governing bodies deemed Cullen’s ideas about the vista too radical, impractical, and, perhaps, expensive.
“Cullen cautioned against the accentuation of the imperial form of the vista by adding to its linearity with government buildings, as well as against allowing the vista to become a barrier between parts of the city.”
Figure 6. Cullen’s illustration of India’s parliament building, surrounded by high-rise towers. From Gordon Cullen, The Ninth Delhi (1961).
Today, however, Cullen’s plans stand as examples of enormously creative problem-solving for a city that had, by 1959, been the site of significant trauma, upheaval, and change. I don’t mean to infer that Cullen had all the answers to Delhi’s problems. He most certainly did not. And I think most residents and visitors are quite glad that there aren’t half a dozen 60’s-era skyscrapers dotting Delhi’s central vista. (One need just look at some of the buildings put up during this era on nearby Barakhamba Road to be convinced of this). But Cullen was effective in identifying the particular problems that the vista possessed as part of a complicated urban space.
Cullen cautioned against the accentuation of the imperial form of the vista by adding to its linearity with government buildings, as well as against allowing the vista to become a barrier between parts of the city. And he cautioned against making the vista a place unto itself, full of government offices without the addition of a democratic vitality that mixed-use planning would bring to it.
In the decades that followed Cullen’s short stay in Delhi, his recommendations were routinely ignored by government planners. The vista nevertheless evolved into a significant site in which the democratic norms of India could, on occasion, be seen on full display. Set aside images of armed soldiers marching along the vista each January 26th (Republic Day) or, more recently, thousands partaking in World Yoga Day. Instead, think of how the vista became, more or less organically, a space of leisure, of sociability, and of popular protest, and in the process how it was transformed from an imperial space into something else entirely.
In the years after 1947, the vista was an increasingly popular destination for families, young couples, and tourists, such that the government added toilet facilities, and enterprising vendors opened dhabas (small eateries) on side streets. As the trees matured, picnicking in their shade became a popular way for the poor to escape the stifling heat of summer in old Delhi. Families could hire paddle boats on the vista’s reflecting ponds and finish the day with ice cream bought from a vendor near India Gate.
The vista has also hosted numerous protests, including nearly a half million farmers affiliated with the Bharatiya Kisan Union who camped on the grounds of the vista’s boat club in 1988 demanding more favorable price controls for their crops. More recently, in 2012, the vista was the setting for public outrage against the gang rape and murder of a Delhi student. In both instances, the people of India used the vista to bring their voices straight to the heart of their government.
Cullen didn’t necessarily provide Delhi’s government with an appropriate path for the vista’s development. But he did at least identify what could be lost with inappropriate development. The question for the government’s chief architect, Bimal Patel, now tasked to reimagine the vista yet again, is whether the new design will ultimately help—or hinder—India’s founding democratic norms.
Banner Image: The Vista, New Delhi, looking to the west and Rashtrapati Bhavan. Photograph by krishna, courtesy Adobe Stock, IU license.
Notes
[1] University of Westminster, London, Gordon Cullen Papers, Box 33, Notebook 2.
[2] G. Cullen, The Ninth Delhi (Delhi: 1961), 10-11. Also, see G. Cullen, The Concise Townscape (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1975 [1961]), 20.
[3] Cullen, Ninth Delhi, 27-8, 39.
[4] Cullen, Ninth Delhi, 27-31.
[5] Cullen, Ninth Delhi, 30, 40.
[6] See the correspondence in University of Chicago, Special Collections, Albert Mayer papers, box 20, folder 26.
