'The Delhi Sarai': The Book He Did Not Write

This is an excerpt from the 11th H. Y. Sharada Prasad Memorial Lecture by Narayani Gupta, Delhi, 13 April 2025.

An irreverent beginning –

Way down South, where the bananas grow,
A grasshopper stepped on an elephant’s toe.
The elephant said, with tears in his eyes,
‘Next time pick one of your own size’.

Today it is the grasshopper scrambling in the grass, who may be squashed by the elephant. But I, the grasshopper, remember Sharada Prasad’s kind smiling eyes, and am rashly trying to put together my ideas on a subject I so wish he had written on. 

He did leave behind a remarkable collection, titled The Book I Won’t Be Writing, reflective pieces written after retirement, from 1993 to 2001. Some individuals, in times of anxiety or uncertainty, open a book of scripture at random, and often find a reassuring statement. This book has filled that role for me on occasion. On February 26 this year, when I was haunted by photographs of the incident at the New Delhi railway station, the book fell open on page 171, to an essay titled “Even Prayer is a Privilege” about the stampedes in Ujjain and Haridwar in August 1996. 

In the half century he spent in Delhi, many features of the nation took shape, some modifications of British Indian ones, others modified from institutions in other countries. His writing has a remarkable quality of detachment, and is free of compulsive use of the first-person singular. His clarity of vision gives his appraisals a timeless value. His sentences are free of jargon and generalisation, though there are instances of speaking tongue-in-cheek – such as when he refers to the time when ministers “were savants, not managers of human resources”.

He was perhaps the most eminent savant himself. But there was another side to him, of delight in the visual and in regional cultures – as comes through in two other books – the ‘Life and Landscapes’ of Karnataka and of India. In the second book, published the year before he left us, Delhi finds a paragraph on page 54 – which summarises the essential features that could have been enlarged into a book – its “strategic location”, “its emotional pull”, its “great style, [which] attracted poets, jewellers and soldiers of fortune from all over the world”. He adds “it might come as a surprise to some…to learn that Chandni Chowk served as a model when Louis XIV laid out the Champs Élysées in Paris”.

I am putting together my own sense of the Delhi region in that half-century, when it was morphing into a sprawling Delhi Municipal Corporation and a small self-regarding New Delhi. I like to recall the one thing Sharada Prasad and I had in common – we both negotiated Delhi by public bus, the wild ‘blue-line’ vehicles, a nightmare that thankfully vanished in 2012!

The city as Sarai

Delhi, for centuries, has had settled populations as well as recent immigrants. Village and city-dwellers had watched groups of people streaming in, some confidently, others hopefully, many others despairingly. Over the last two millennia, the region came to be dotted with sarais, rest-houses for travellers and traders from many lands. (Erasing their names, being done arbitrarily today, is to lose the sense of the micro-culture.)

In the 1950s and 60s, the urban sprawl from Mehrauli to Model Town, from Shahdara to Najafgarh, was becoming populated and built on by a busy army of ants. And there was always joy in finding someone else from one’s ‘home-town’. When strangers met, invariably the first question was “Where are you from?”

Islands of regional culture developed – Kashmiri, Punjabi and Sindhi, Bengali, Tamil, later a loose “South Indian”, which kept alive music, languages and art forms. Some immigrants stayed on, others moved away or moved ‘back’. As late as the 1980s, a Bengali professor at JNU explained why they had invested in cane furniture — wood was bulky, and “We will be going back to Calcutta”. The unspoken assumption was that while those from the west had come to stay, those from the south and east would eventually return to their “home-towns”. Delhi was a sarai.

From home-town to nation

The young Kannadiga journalist who came to Delhi in 1957 (with no premonition that this was to be a permanent relocation) did not delude himself that the capital’s streets were paved with gold. He had been an active nationalist who believed that nationalism was entering a new and constructive phase. Sharada Prasad’s sense of the nation was perfectly compatible with his sense of belonging to Karnataka, which always retained a special place in his writing and social interactions. 

Delhi in the 1950s and 60s basked in the memory of past greatness, and at the same time wanted to be a modern city. This had implications for social policy, education and town-planning. His initiatives in Delhi would be on a different plane – where one hand held the strings that connected the capital with the newly-minted states, and the other the longer cords that connected India to new and old nation-states. The Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) served the first, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) the second.

Sharada Prasad’s Delhi

Had Sharada Prasad been of an earlier generation, an immigrant in the 1930s, when New Delhi was being laid out, the neighbourhoods that gave him shelter would have been barren or village land. In terms of habitat, his progression was like that of most journalists and public functionaries. From Shakti Nagar, a DLF development of the 1950s, north of the Civil Lines and along the Grand Trunk Road, he moved to the older elegant avenue of Alipur Road, the spine of the Civil Lines. Four years in the upper-middle-class west Delhi neighbourhood of Patel Nagar was followed by a move upward to the government enclave of Moti Bagh (gentrified from Mochi) and then 20 years on the serene southern edge of “Lutyensabad”, on beautiful Ratendon Road, about to become Amrita Sher-Gil Marg, and near South End Road (now the sense lost in its new name of Rajesh Pilot Marg). 

People were being defined by their neighbourhoods, and the ‘type’ of ‘housing’ shaped snobberies. Sharada Prasad was one of the rare beings who was untroubled by this. Also, since he had not, like more farsighted colleagues, invested in land in the new ‘colonies’, his two decades in retirement were spent in a first-floor flat of a cooperative group housing society in DDA’s imaginatively-named Paschim Vihar.

Another instance of the truth of the saying – “Delhi has many gates for entry, but none for departure” – meaning that those who come to the city invariably stay on permanently.

I imagine that Sharada Prasad derived sustenance not only from books and friends but also from contemplating Delhi’s past and present. For an idealistic person like him, it was the place to be in, at an exciting time when goodwill and optimism rode high, when ideas could take form in institutions, where land could be shaped into public and private neighbourhoods.

Delhi was a site, constantly being transformed. But what was Delhi?

Zubaan-e-Dehli

Nearly 300 books have been written about Delhi, perhaps more will surface, each with some insight to add, and in different languages, Indian, central-, east- and west-Asian, European. Languages met and mixed – one likes to imagine that the language Saraiki, linking Punjabi and Sindhi, evolved in conversations at sarais.  

From the end of the 18th century, some of these were in an evolving language which was known as Dakhini/Urdu, and could equally have been called Dehlavi, the term used as a ‘surname’ by individuals who were proud to identify themselves with the place. One reason for the popularity of ‘Urdu’ was the ease with which it merged into Hindi and Khadi Boli, and the ease with which English-speakers understood it. But that very popularity, and because, unlike more rigorous languages, it had different registers (five, according to Gopi Chand Narang) which accommodated the court elite as well as the rickshaw-puller, made other Indians not take it seriously as an official language. In the 1950s, the upper-class immigrants were comfortable in what they proudly assumed was the Queen’s English, but which was constantly getting modified by Indian languages (god-man, colony, -wala, pukka - cf  the wonderful dictionary compiled by Nigel Hankin, Hanklyn-Janklin, 1992).

A century and a half earlier (1812), a young man of Agra had moved to Delhi and, like Sharada Prasad, was to live there 50 years. He was to write:

Ik roz apni ruh se poochha Ki Dilli kya hai?

The answer:

Yah duniya mano jism hai Aur Dilli uski jaan

For Asadullah Khan Ghalib, and for many others, Dilli as the ‘beating heart’ of the region/the country/the world, implied a world united by a nuanced language, with compositions which kept morale high through a succession of political and economic disasters and recoveries. But the moving poems or texts in Urdu continue to be studied discreetly, not as part of history. To a person like Sharada Prasad, Urdu seemed to be a series of languorous shairi, because his work and social interactions did not permit him the luxury of reading serious works in the Farsi script.

The 1940s had been a time when Gandhiji’s wise suggestion could have been put into action – to have as a link-language in India Hindustani in the Roman script (as has been done in Mizoram and Ladakh). Instead, the new regime made a gift of Delhi’s language to the Pakhtoon, Punjabi and Sindhi speaking people of Pakistan, who then inflicted it on the Bengalis of East Pakistan! 

(Note added on April 16 — yesterday the Supreme Court pronounced that Urdu was not associated with any specific religion, and was an Indo-Aryan language born in India).

Dariya, pahari, nahar

Delhi was defined not only by its language, but its landscape too. Sharada Prasad would have recognised not only a crossroads city but one that was repeatedly a magnet for able rulers, as Mysore had been. Its landscape told a tale. The Wadiyar rulers of Mysore since the 1300s had created a prosperous economy at the same time as the Delhi sultans were commissioning major canals. At different periods of history, the initiatives of rulers helped Delhi develop a rich agriculture and orchards, and become a production centre and a busy trade entrepôt. The concern for highways and waterways shown by rulers at all times (cf  Wittfogel) make Mohammed and Feroze Tughlaq, Sher Shah and Shah Jahan, working with the brilliant Persian engineer Ali Mardan Khan, Delhi’s greatest benefactors, as was to be appreciated in the 19th century by the British Public Works Department engineers, who reinforced them (Alan Robertson, Epic Engineering: Great Canals and Barrages of Victorian India, 2013) and later by the sociologist-town designer Patrick Geddes in the 1920s.

The locations of the various Delhi settlements reflected different concerns – security (when citadels were built on the high ground of the Mehrauli Aravallis), connection to the fertile eastern Doab (when forts were built on the riverine plains), sentiment and pleasant climate (the northern Civil Lines) and health (Lutyens’s New Delhi).

The connections between water-channels and religious shrines have only recently been documented, the Yamuna as a highway is described in travelogues, the connection of forests and hills to village groups, and to mendicants, are only passingly mentioned. The magic of the bonding of forest, streams and shrines at a fraught time when Nadir Shah had invaded the city, as well as the cultures that brought together people of all classes, was powerfully captured by Dargah Quli Khan in his Muraqqa-e-Dehli (1737-41). Later, other scholars meticulously listed shrines and inscriptions. In 1943, Percival Spear of St Stephens College, in his book on Delhi for school-children urged the students to read the Farsi inscriptions on historic buildings. Grown-ups also enjoyed doing this.

Over time, Delhi has lost much of its built and its recorded history, most recently with the destructions of books and pamphlets in 1857 and 1947, when albums and manuscripts were dismembered to be sold to rich but only superficially scholarly clients on the steps of the Jama Masjid in the years after 1947, and for some to find their way to flea-markets in London and New York. It is only in the last ten years that the need was felt to translate them into English, by which time many structures had disappeared or been vandalised. Rural Delhi has in recent years registered its presence by inscribing their names at the entrance to ‘urban villages’ and exploring their history (the Dilli Dehaat group).

The ‘seven cities’

We may assume that Sharada Prasad did not choose to see historic Delhi except as royal enclaves. Few newcomers did. Blind to the smaller vestiges of the past, they all clung to the trunk of the elephant. This has been a great loss.

It has been a royal and an imperial city, but the cliché about the ‘seven cities of Delhi’ is inaccurate – it is perhaps transferred from the ‘Seven Hills of Rome’, and in the same genre as Tod’s romanticisation of Rajputana in the 1840s. In terms of location or fort-palace, a change of dynasty did not mean a shift of the royal palace/fort – a point I realised when my schoolboy son asked me where the Sayyids’ city was; it overlapped with the  earlier Tughlaq and later Lodi areas.

Delhi has been not only a royal city, but a bruised city. Poets, from Amir Khusro to Mir and Dagh, celebrated it in elegies as much as in eulogies, and were known as shahr-ashob.

Qila mubarak, city beautiful

Despite the wealth of information about Delhi’s built past, the connections are not always obvious. Research or narratives are in tunnel-fashion. Also, rulers tend to be slotted as ‘good/far-sighted’ or ‘bad/dissipated’, and the epithets were extended to everything that happened in their reigns. A classic case is Badshah Mohammed Shah. Damned with the label “Rangila”, for a long time he was not given credit for his court’s patronage of music. Historians of art and architecture came late on the scene, and were able to draw out points of inspiration and influence, of the eclectic quality which made the lazy terms Hindu/Buddhist/Islamic limited for purpose of definition, where material, climate, geography were equally defining. Fergusson was more perceptive than the popular Percy Brown, who oversimplified the narrative, and categorised Indian art and architecture by religion. Just as the zubaan of Delhi incorporated many languages, so did its building skills draw from other parts of the subcontinent and beyond, as shown by Dr Ebba Koch.

The only Delhi-specific writing by Sharada Prasad was on the architecture of the Rashtrapati Bhawan – a succinct and affordable book, with material drawn from the sudden flood of lavish books in the 1970s and 80s on Lutyens and on New Delhi, when the architect, after a bad press, suddenly became fashionable.

Baker’s New Delhi Secretariat buildings, to which Sharada Prasad was a  frequent visitor, were superscribed, in the fashion of north American public buildings, with somewhat banal inscriptions – that on the North Block, in English, spoke to the aspirational middle class:

“Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to liberty. It is a blessing which can be earned before it can be enjoyed”. 

That on the South Block was in Farsi, and Sharada Prasad, like many others, could not decipher its benevolent tone, addressed to farmers and workers: 

“In their prosperity will be our strength, in their contentment our security, and in their gratitude our best reward”.

Lost in translation

War destroys speedily, peace slowly. In the past century, deserted buildings have been noticed only when the Archaeological Survey inspects them and labels them. But the buildings had been documented by date, architectural details and inscriptions by scholars from the 18th century. 

Holistic studies could have been undertaken in the 1960s, on the basis of Syed Ahmad Khan’s Asar-us Sanadid, 1854 (used by English scholars, translated into French, but not into English till 2018), the 3 volumes in Urdu by Bashiruddin Ahmad (1919) and the definitive 3-volume Japanese study of Sultanate waterways and architecture (Yamamoto and Ara, Delhi: Architectural Remains of the Delhi Sultanate Period, Tokyo, 1967). But the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) restricted itself to putting up the blue metallic “protection” boards, and did not connect with historians or art specialists. Moreover, the policy of keeping the monuments depressingly empty and unlit meant they conjured up atmospheric visions of ghosts rather than of brightly-lit architecture.

For most Indians, historic architecture was worth visiting only if it had been prettified, and if it functioned as ‘living monuments’ (cf the tragic example of the exquisite ceiling frescoes of a Madurai temple being happily whitewashed). From the 18th century, the rare Indian visitor to Britain was baffled by the English travellers’ fascination for crumbling bits of Greece and Rome, which they carefully brought back to install in their rain-drenched parks – reflected in Delhi by Metcalfe’s ‘Follies’, invented ruins, at the Qutub Minar.

Sadly, with the use of the heavy term ‘monuments’ by the ASI, the emphasis was on monumentality, and the little chhatris, kiosks, partly-broken older buildings, meticulously listed by Professor Ara, were thought not worth preserving. Modern Rome has so much to teach us in the way small ruins are integrated into city design. With a sense of imagination, the vestiges of Delhi’s past, large and small, works of sturdy engineering as well as fine architecture, could have transformed the landscape. This is what led the DDA to commission Nalini Thakur, India’s first conservation architect, to document what came to be called the ‘Mehrauli Archaeological Park’ in 1988. Sadly, this has fallen victim to the lethal mix of indifference and corruption. 

A happier example is the Sundar Nursery, where the historic remains have been saved from a similar fate by professional maintenance and regulated use.

Heritage city, international city

The ASI in the 19th century had been a model to be followed by England in its own territory, but in India, after a brilliant spurt in the early 20th century inspired by Curzon’s dedication, it became increasingly unimaginative. In 1958, it was reorganised, with state-level departments, making for not efficiency but lack of clarity. It also had to live up to its connection with UNESCO, of which India had become a member in 1946. Sharada Prasad’s essay “Neglected Children of Uncaring Ministries” shows his concern to free institutions from bureaucratic control.

Recounting a telling episode, he recalled Maulana Azad drily telling a joint secretary who was going to “send for the ASI DG”, "Did I hear you right? You will not send for him. You will go to him.”

Years later, in 1996 when the Tourism Minister demanded that ASI be freed from archaeologists and handed over to his ministry, Sharada Prasad commented – “That would be like appointing wolves as wardens of deer parks.” (p. 142)

The dreary term “protection” did nothing to enhance historic architecture. A multicultural country from which India can learn both how to take care of its architectural heritage and how to develop sustainable heritage is Turkey. This point was forcefully made by Mukul Kesavan in 2005.

“The Blue Mosque and the mausoleum of Sultan Ahmet were built less than 40 years before Shah Jahan built the Jama Masjid and the walled city around it. …And yet, as I walked around his monuments, they felt oddly contemporary because they were furnished. There were carpets on the floor, and curtains, clocks and vacuum cleaners. Ahmet’s tomb had wooden cases filled with things he used, like books, swords and relics of the Prophet. Even the graves seemed lived in, covered as they were with tented rugs, almost as if there was someone home.

Delhi’s great monuments, even those in continuous use like the Jama Masjid, are bare. This is partly because they were built for a different climate. … But the other reason …is because the world that made them didn’t survive into the present. The interior of Humayun’s Tomb used to be draped and carpeted and lit once upon a time, because it was tended by his descendants.

Inside the Blue Mosque, the time inside the monument and the time outside it, seem in sync. The bareness of Delhi’s medieval monuments, the lack of anything perishable that might need tending, make them seem infinitely older than the world outside. They feel like imposing shells that have been waiting for centuries for someone to furnish them. The reason for this difference isn’t hard to find. Colonialism was an existential displacement; the change of ownership it implied sterilised the monuments that the colonial state took into its care.”

In the 1980s, the Taj Mahal got recognition as a World Heritage monument, followed by others – the present tally is 43. This has changed nothing – the large and tall were rewarded, but the “lesser ones” – a term often used in describing historic architecture – are ignored. The same spirit pervaded the work of INTACH, despite the valiant effort by AGK Menon to draw up a Charter for “unprotected architectural heritage and sites” in 2004. The process of ‘listing’ has gone on for 20 years, but there has been little follow-up action. At another level is the conservation of more visible structures, where conservation architects and conventional archaeologists do not always see eye to eye. The Aga Khan Trust has achieved the ideal of carefully planned projects involving skills, communities, monuments, green areas and open areas. One can only pray that the spirit spreads. 

And that it will counter a discussion listed in Parliament, on the basis of a report from a committee in the PMO (which did not include any archaeologist or architect), which coolly suggested ‘rationalisation’, now called ‘delisting’, to remove small structures from ASI protection. There can be hope for our kos-minars and stone bridges only if we become an informed and concerned citizenry.

Modernist Delhi

In the 1960s, while the ASI grappled with Delhi’s past, others were fantasising about the Delhi of the future. Going beyond the more limited interventions of the Delhi Improvement Trust of 1936, a bold plan was being prepared to ‘develop’ the region of Delhi through the new Town and Country Planning Organisation. This involved two processes – improvement projects in older habitats, and laying out new urban habitats in agricultural or barren lands. The first paralleled the major activity in European cities in the years after the War – the dedicated and difficult ‘reconstruction’ of older areas, based on old maps and practices. 

I like to think that Sharada Prasad, who had in 1961 made possible the establishment of the National Institute of Design (NID) at Ahmedabad, would have been sympathetic to this. Certainly, it could not be expected of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), whose Master Plan of 1962 did not treat the historic city of Shahjahanabad as a landscape to be cherished. (In the 1980s, a gentleman in Bhopal commented, “I am worried that all the mistakes made in the Delhi Master Plan will be made here too.”)  

The Mughal city was shockingly defined as a slum. This American term was unsympathetic to the concept of the mohalla, and the poetic images of galis and kuchas, to which a planner in Paris might have been more empathetic. The NID could have been the bridge between arts and new technologies, between the past and the future, between small and monumental. After all, thus had thinkers and designers worked for centuries, where each designer rejoiced in his skill, and was not paralysed by mind-numbing repetitive work, and saw his task as “pious labour”.

Planning terms being used in the West sounded glamorous. One such was the ‘green belt’ plan for Delhi, which would have been a sensitive way to respect the natural landscape, and was reminiscent of Mughal towns ringed with baghs, recorded in maps and which came through in poetry. But somewhere along the way, with the encouragement of the Ford Foundation experts, Delhi found itself ringed with ‘farm-houses’ (some 5,000) which were a disaster — unproductive, turning fertile village fields into opulent homes and swimming pools, and ‘farms’ for lettuce and broccoli. 

The TCPO, despite the Geddesian tone in its name, aligned itself with the dreary zoning style being adopted for new American towns and by Abercrombie for Greater London. Delhi planners envied the clean slate that Corbusier had for his project. Also, the clean stark lines of the modernist movements appealed to young architects the world over. Among them was the first generation of Indian planners and architects, some of whom were friends or acquaintances of Sharada Prasad. Mr Jagmohan, who wrote his credo in an ambitious book, Rebuilding Shahjahanabad (1975), saw himself as another Haussmann or Andre Malraux, his impatience for drastic action making him more in the image of the former.

The symbiotic ties between geography, language, creative arts and habitats were coming undone.

City as a work of art

Alarm bells rang when New Delhi started to go the high-rise way, looking to be another New York. Indira Gandhi, in 1974, was responsive to architect Patwant Singh, and introduced another – very different – feature of New York urbanism, a city art Commission.

‘Art’ is frequently spelt in the plural, missing the point — ‘urban art’ meant not arts in the city but the city as a work of art. This opened up possibilities just as the NID had done. However, by linking it to a ministry, it became subject to the flaw that Sharada Prasad referred to, in the context of education and culture, where in 1,996 leadership was transferred from savants to “human resource developers”. This put me in mind of Lewis Carroll’s Mad Tea Party, where the Hatter (the minister) and the March Hare (the civil servant) stuffed the Dormouse (the autonomous institution) into the teapot. 

The Delhi Urban Art Commission (DUAC) and the later Heritage Conservation Committee were pathetically ineffective, functioning as adjuncts to the Ministry of Urban Development. ‘Development’ is a neutral word, but has an unyielding quality to it, even more so when teamed with the term ‘Authority’.

Expanding Delhi, shrinking Delhi

Kiran Karnik has suggested that we ‘shrink’ Delhi, spread out institutions and ministries across the states, open up more urban green spaces, recall the spirit of Shahjahanabad, which was a clump of mohallas divided internally by quiet curving roads, encircled by private gardens, and set against a wide river and a friendly Ridge. 

All these have been attenuated, and the city lost its human scale. A city is not just real estate, it is the embodiment of a culture. Recall Ghalib.

The happiness quotient

There are happy cities and there are tired cities. Delhi has always had the capacity to be a happy city, an outdoor city, a festive city. But we need to see it primarily as a place where people live, not just endlessly commute long distances. People must reclaim their open spaces and their ice-cream corners, not just be pacified with malls and bazaars. The most impressive cities of the world are safe for children, women and the old. Cleanliness and good lighting matter to pedestrians and cyclists – but not to passengers in humungous cars. 

A lone warrior for humane cities was Ranjit Sabikhi, who left us recently. Can his writings be more widely read? Can a visit to Indore be made compulsory for all school children in Delhi?  This country is not just a nation, but also a democracy, which is not just something that must be pulled out at elections. Could we ease out the term ‘VIP’, and make individuals ashamed if it is used for them, as much as common pejoratives?

Just after I typed that, my eyes fell on a piece in the Hindustan Times of March 30 – an account of the Environment Conference, inaugurated by the First Citizen of our country. In one of the most moving speeches I have ever read, Droupadi Murmu described how her father used to bow to the logs he chopped for firewood. He was seeking forgiveness. She spoke of the “natural bond between water, forest and people”. 

It is this wisdom, which has come down to us from the original inhabitants of this land, that we have to cherish.

Recall the lines in the Vishnu Purana:

           पृथ्वी ममैषाऽऽशु परित्यजैनां वदंति ये दूतमुखैस्स्वशत्रून् ।

          नराधिपास्तेषु ममातिहासः पुनश्च मूढेषु दयाऽभ्युपैति १३६ ।

Prithvi says, “When I hear a king sending word to another, ‘This earth is mine; immediately resign your pretensions to it’, I am moved to violent laughter at first, but it soon subsides in pity for the infatuated fool”.

A raja, however strong, could not own any part of our Earth, but the praja could nurture it. In the 1770s, Prithvi Narayan Shah of Nepal, said: “The nation is not created by my little effort. It is a garden of all the people.”  

What a happy motto for our beautiful city! And gratitude to its gardeners – Ferozeshah Tughlaq, Ali Mardan, Jahanara Begum, Percy Lancaster, Mohammad Shaheer…

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