Portals at Hauz Khas

People, they say, like to live in large cities but want it to feel like a small village. Surprisingly, this optimum arrangement is possible even in an ugly crowded polluted sprawling foul megatropolis like modern Delhi. There, right amidst the mess, is the village enclave of Hauz Khas – a small cul de sac closed off from the insane traffic, a place that houses artists, poets, nightclubs and fashionable eateries. It is a remarkable thing to discover in such a city. Unfortunately, it is no longer a secret and so Delhi’s rising middle class are moving in rapidly and will, inevitably, ruin the village ambience within a few short years.

Originally Hauz Khas was a former incarnation of Delhi itself. It was once the centre of the city under the pre-Moghul Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth century. The ruins of the city are the structural basis of the modern “village” which hugs the stone walls of the old city. The Sultan, Firoz Shah, had constructed a “tank” – in fact a sizeable lake – at the site, along with mosques and a large madrassa. When the Mongols sacked Bagdhad, this place – the Hauz Khas madrassa – became for a while the premier learning centre of the entire Mahometan world. It is built in the rough-hewn style of the Delhi sultans, that is, quite distinct and noticeably more unadorned and more primitive than the later Moghuls who brought a more sophisticated Persian influence to northern Hindustan, but this roughness – virile, solid - has a beauty and charm of its own.

The present author spent a pleasant afternoon exploring the ruins of the madrassa and the tombs of the sultan and his sons, along with the modern village, several weeks ago.

For photographic purposes the outstanding feature of the ruins are the extant portals and gateways – something that always attracts this author in any case. Portals – doorways, gateways, passageways – are always of interest because, of all architectural features they tend to last longer than roofs and walls and windows, and, of course, they have an enduring symbolic significance. A portal is a mystery. What lies beyond? Spatially it signifies the passage from one world to another. Temporally it signifies the passage from one phase or condition to another. It is a place that inherently signifies transition, transformation, initiation. Its celestial archetype is the portal of the sun, the gates of the solstices and equinoxes – with the ‘watchtowers’ either side - through which the sun (along with the planets) passes on its journey. 

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Below are some of the portals to be found in the ruins of Hauz Khas:

The tomb of Sultan Firoz Shah

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

Edwin Landseer Lutyen

A painting depicting the collected works of Sir Edwin Lutyen, by Carl Lauben. It features all of Lutyen's major works, including, prominent in the centre, the unbuilt masterpiece the Liverpool Cathedral. 

There is possibly no other city on earth that can be said to be the product of a single creative mind to the same extent as New Delhi - the creation of Edwin Landseer Lutyen. He is often described as the greatest British architect of the modern era by those not infected by the democratic evils of modernism; he had a profound impact upon the building of the new capital of British India, New Delhi, throughout an extended period in the 1920s and 30s.

For a range of reasons, the British had found it prudent to move the capital of the Raj from Calcutta in 1911. They then set about constructing an entire new city among the previous six incarnations of the city of Delhi on the Jamuna River, and the task of designing it along with its grand imperial architecture fell to Lutyen. New Delhi today - where this author has recently arrived, his third visit - is still often referred to as "Lutyen's Delhi" and - leaving aside the appalling pollution and the even more appalling degradations of commerce, visual pollution on an epic scale - still largely conforms to Lutyen's grand vision. There is a large area of wide avenues and colonial buildings - deliberately contrasting to the tangled laneways of the old city - where nearly everything, from the broad sweep of the urban plan to the street lights, were designed by Sir Edwin "Ned" Lutyen. 

It is unfortunate that most of his grandest buildings in Delhi are now occupied by the various arms of the government of the Indian Republic, and so for security reasons are closed to the public. The great Viceroy's Residence, the 'Rashtrapati Bhavan' - now the residence of the President of India - and its vast formal gardens (designed by Lutyen), are only open to the public for several days in a year. Other nearby structures are occupied by the Indian Ministry of Defense and are permanently out of reach. When the author visited this area in recent days even the famous India Gate - a memorial the Britishers constructed to honour the Indian soldiers who had fought and died for the Empire in the Great War - was closed to public access with all approach roads manned by teams of heavily armed soldiers at road blocks. (You can stop and take photographs for two minutes and are then moved along.) 

It is difficult, therefore, to obtain a full appreciation of Sir Edwin's vision of the city in its totality, and especially difficult to obtain a proper sense of his genius for interior design. For, as well as grand architecture, Lutyen also designed furnishings, lighting and the other trappings of interiors, all the way down to the vegetable racks in the kitchens. His art and his vision was comprehensive and marked by a complete attention to detail. He was a style in and of himself. 

Happily, Lutyen's work is characterised by his rejection of modernism and his embrace of the classical. He is a shining light of sobriety and mathematical integrity in an age of dreadful buildings. His later buildings have a strongly neo-Romanesque solidity - a heaviness of the walls, small windows, domes, round arches. His work falls into two phases, the second of them entailing a detailed exploration of classical (Graceo-Roman, and especially Roman) themes. He devoted his life to the rediscovery of the classic. He loved the purity of the classical order and classical proportions. "When they are right," he wrote, "they are curiously lovely and unalterable like a plant form." Accordingly, modernist critics hated him. He defied the age of the "masses and the machine." Many older books on modern architecture routinely sneer at his work and wrongly dismiss it as "historical pastiche". 

It is an undeniably Imperial architecture that we find in Lutyen's Delhi. In the main structures he chose to build in the local red sandstone, the same stone from which the earlier monuments of the city, especially in its Moghul incarnation, are built - the Jama Masjid, the Red Fort, and so on - and this provides a strong sense of continuity and belonging - and yet in other respects his buildings speak of the British Empire's conscious sense of a reprise of Roman Imperial strength. Lutyen avoids the pointed arch and most other oriental motifs; his buildings are strongly and adamantly occidental: austerity, power, solidity, weight, permanence, endurance, immovability, masculinity. There is some irony in this. His buildings are about the eternal British Empire and of India's enduring place in the British dominions, the jewel in the British crown. 

Some of the author's photographs (on a day of heavy pollution):

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LUTYEN & HEMINGWAY

Lutyen was a great punster with a warm wit. There are many wonderful stories about him. One of the best is as follows:

He was once employed by Ernest Hemingway to build a house in Hemingway's ancestral home of Ilkley, Yorkshire. When accompanying Hemingway around the unfinished building, Lutyen gestured to the place where a black marble staircase would be. Hemingway protested. "I don't want a black marble staircase!" he said. "I want an oak staircase!" Lutyen looked over his round eyeglasses and said, "What a pity." When the house was completed, however, there - sure enough - was a black marble staircase. Hemingway protested again. "I said I didn't want a black marble staircase!" he said. "I know," said Lutyen,"and I said, 'What a pity.'" 

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Below is a representative selection of some of the furniture designed by Lutyen. We can see, especially, his love of the circle (along with, by extension, the octagon) as the basic unit of classical (especially Roman) forms. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

The Labyrinth in Lucknow

While Benares, where the author has been for the last month, is a resoundingly Hindoo city, Lucknow, further to the north, is the premiere city of Shia Mahometans in India. The author journeyed there over the New Year. It was once the capital of the great fiefdom of the Nawab of Ood and has a distinctive culture celebrated for its fine manners and genteel ambience. Today, of course, it is a sprawling Indian mess but much of the old city, marked by various medieval gates, is still intact. In particular, the central mosques and the great centre of Shi'ite learning - the Imambara (theological college) - is especially well-preserved and an inspiring complex of architecture that is quite different to that of the (Sunni) Moghuls. The Nawabs of Ood were cultured and benevolent, if indulgent, men and embarked upon vast building projects, reputedly as a means of providing work for their hungry citizens during lean times. 

View from the roof of the Imambara

The truly unique feature of the Imambara (the big one, not the smaller complex further down the road, also called 'Imambara'), and reason enough to visit there, is in the ceiling of its main hall. The architect, Khifayatullah, has seen fit to build an elborate labyrinth (more correctly, it's a maze) into the upper levels of the building, supposedly to thwart would-be intruders. It is said that only he and the Nawab knew the path through it. Today it is open to the public, and the author spent several hours of a warm winter afternoon - New Year's Day - stumbling around in the tangle of halls and corridors and stairways that constitute the 'Bhul Bhulaiya' as it is known. 

During the daytime it is not impossibly difficult to navigate, since one can follow the light and keep taking paths back to the outside of the building, but during the night it would be diabolical. Many corridors lead to dead ends, but others lead to precipitous drops. As it is, the author found himself completely lost within a few turns and on several occasions had to return to the roof of the building to re-orient himself. As a labyrinth it is certainly effective and mysterious, even if on Friday afternoons - after the communal prayer, which is when the author was there - it is crowded with groups of teenagers squealing and giggling at the thrill of being lost. 

The following are some of the author's pictures of the labyrinth and should give readers a sense of the structure. There are, they say, some 500 doorways in the complex. The labyrinth works by offering stairwells up or down at strategic places. If you take the stairs up when you should have taken them down, you're lost. 

The Benares of James Prinsep

British India produced many genius orientalists, but few with such innate talent and breadth as Mr. James Prinsep. He showed great aptitude for drawing and draughtsmanship at an early age but had weak eyesight and so was directed away from the visual arts to a career as a metallurgist and assayist. It was as an assayist working for the British Mint that he ventured to India and took a position in Benares. There he became deeply interested in early Indian coins which led him to decipher the Kharosthi and Brahmi scripts, the feat of scholarship for which he is most renowned. 

But, in Benares, he also made extensive drawings and engravings of the sacred city and accomplished much else in both the humanities and the sciences. His drawings and lithographs are some of the finest ever made by an orientalist artist, a sublime record of British Benares. In an age where our intellectual elites are poisoned with post-colonial resentment, however, his genius and achievements have been forgotten. Few remember James Prinsep now, though he would have been an extraordinary character in any age. His contribution to the Benares and to its people was profound. More generally, he made a substantial contribution to a wide range of disciplines - a polymath of great imagination and talent. 

The life and times of this unsung hero - and the life and times of Benares, the most sacred city of the Hindoos - is presented in a charming documentary entitled The Benares of James Princep, thus:

The description of the movie:

James Prinsep landed in india in 1819.

He came to work in the mint as an essay master for the East India Company but destiny had bigger plans.

Truly a man for all seasons, his genius blossomed as an artist,linguist,architect,translator,wri­ter,engineer and scientist.

He died at the age of 40.

His brilliance has been ignored by the world.

May this documentary shed light on him and the holy city that he loved.

Readers can find a trailer and instalment of the movie here. 

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The present writer, having moved along from a week-long sojourn in Boodh Gaya, is now residing for a while in mystical Benares and is privileged to spend his days - especially his mornings - strolling along the ghats on the banks of the Ganges. He is pleased to report that, although less treed, spotted with graffiti and advertising, and suffering the usual cement degradations of Indian modernity, little of substance has changed on the riverfront since the time of James Prinsep. The city is thousands of years old, one of the oldest continually occupied cities in the world. The old city sections with its narrow streets - as opposed to modern commercial extensions - have remained more or less intact since the time of the British Raj. Some things, such as the open-air cremation grounds on the river banks, have remained unchanged since Vedic times. 

The following are some of Mr. Prinsep's engravings of the ghats and other features of Benares. Readers should click on the image for a larger version of each...

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The Prinsep Monument in Calcutta which, regrettably, is now dwarfed by the new bridge across the Hoogley.

James Prinsep became ill in India and returned to Britain to recover. Alas, he  died a young and untimely death in 1840. News of his demise was greeted with consternation throughout British India, and a beautiful monument was built in his honour beside the Hoogley River in Calcutta. The present author has spent time there too, and along the Prinsep Ghat which is, without question, one of the loveliest parts of Calcutta today. It is now gratifying to be in Benares to see first hand the faithfulness of Prinsep's renderings of the architecture of this ancient and most extraordinary of cities. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black