“Art Deco buildings in India help us understand that the architecture of the empire cannot be reduced to imperialist architecture – buildings designed at the behest of imperial authorities, or those that were used for imperial governance.”
Swati Chattopadhyay, Art Deco and Empire: The residential architecture of Ballardie, Thompson and Matthews
In Open City, Teju Cole describes cities as ‘palimpsest’, the accretion of both writing and over-writing on a manuscript. Just as layers of soil form in gradation, so do the built forms of our cities, where buildings crafted in pure features stand adjacent to expressionistic melange. Research projects towards Art Deco in cities of India have focused on both its formal features and monumental embodiment. Yet, Deco seeped beyond the fences of palatial buildings and offices, to be ‘domesticated’ in the residences, professional and community structures, and functional buildings produced by colonial subjects and ordinary citizens, and the emerging turn in print and visual culture with cinema halls, magazines, typefaces, interiors and objects. The advance of Deco beyond imperial projects and public buildings into the imaginary of urban elites symbolised both an impulse towards the throb of modernity and Deco’s pliability to vernacular idioms—characterised by Swati Chattopadhyay as a mode, which exceeds the conventions of style to introduce particularities. Deco in Delhi is a lived register of the arc of modern time, and the temperaments it fostered. As a city is experienced simultaneously through the planned and irregular spaces that compose it, through grids of control and spontaneity, a guide to Deco in Delhi is both a survey of institutional histories and a narration of individual subjectivities, the articulation of both a colony and a nation.
Consider Charan Bhawan, a residence in the Model Basti neighbourhood of New Delhi, built in 1945. At Charan Bhawan, a breath-taking mosaic of terrazzo greets visitors at the entrance, details adorn every curvilinear surface, a central tower and balconies are rendered in pure Deco style. Cinched among these are carvings and miniature statues of Hindu deities, disarmingly at ease with the singular vocabulary of the house. Approaching Deco as a mode requires venturing past the façade embellishments and into a spatial analysis of the style, which yields remarkable insights about the decadienal shifts in living and habitation patterns, a ‘social transformation’ that restructured units of family, work and public life in the early to mid-twentieth century.
In Old Delhi’s Sabzi Mandi neighbourhood, when the Ram Rup Clock Tower was built in 1938, an example of the pure Deco style, it overlooked the towers and chimneys of nearby mills and skirted the trams which connected the city’s labouring class with its industrial outposts. It was built by a private citizen, an affluent businessman named Ram Roop, but served public functions of keeping time, a practice necessary for industry. The turning up of Deco, with flourishes of neo-classical and Egyptian motifs, at the very intersection of clock, motor and mill—the pillars of the ‘factory’ class—in a corner of New Delhi, is testament to the style’s deep imbrication in the axes of economy and society. It is not surprising to find echoes of the Streamline modern style in Delhi’s first airport, the Willingdon Airport constructed in 1936, which connected the city to Egypt and the Far East at the velocity of jet fuel; or in the home for the most crucial technology in the toolkit of nation-building—radio waves, at the All India Radio Bhawan, built in 1943, which features a curved central tower with eyebrows and vertical fins. The collision of modernisation and its attendant technologies with the changing landscape of the capital, the emergence of motifs unique to Delhi, signal the distinct pathways cities in India followed past the threshold of independence.
To look beyond ornamentation, while keeping it affixed in the frame of vision, opens avenues for understanding the proliferation of the Deco mode as a register for the vast terrain of life in the transition from empire to a new nation state, in its varied cadences and notations. The story of Deco in Delhi runs contiguously with the establishment of the city as the capital of the British Empire in 1911 until the ‘50s—an arc that charts the course of modernity in the subcontinent. From the establishment of princely residences in the new capital following the Durbar, to the arrival of motion pictures and cinemas to the city in 1920s, the sprouting of educational campuses in 1930s, to a slate of residences built by industrial elites through the 40s. Deco kept pace with the development of the city, its myriad desires and aspirations.
“It is important to stress that peripheral urbanization does not necessarily entail the growth of cities towards their hinterlands. In other words, it does not simply refer to a spatial location in the city—its margins—but rather to a way of producing space that can be anywhere. What makes this process peripheral is not its physical location but rather the crucial role of residents in the production of space and how as a mode of urbanisation it unfolds slowly, transversally in relation to official logics, and amidst political contestations.”
Teresa PR Caldeira, Peripheral Urbanization: Autoconstruction, transversal logics, and politics in cities of the global south
Another remarkable instance of Deco’s affinity and entanglement with instruments of modernity and its carving of the public sphere and private spaces is Shankar Terrace, a building designed in the pure style and completed in 1936. The building was host to the city’s first allopathic clinic, with India Coffee House in the complex and a printing press next door. Shankar Terrace serves as fascinating lynchpin in a constellation of historical incidents. Shankar Dayal, the patriarch after whom the building is named, was present at the Delhi Durbar of 1911, when the city was named as the capital of the empire. The building was designed by Master, Sathe and Bhuta, the firm that pioneered the use of Deco in Bombay. At Shankar Terrace, the age of reason found its key components flourishing in proximity: modern medicine, print revolution, and public sphere. It is not surprising then to find elements of Deco sprouting abundantly in the earliest institutions of advanced learning in the city—the colleges of the University of Delhi.Besides the commonly occurring central tower, the exposed brick and minimal ornamentation, the colleges served as enclaves symbolising new identities that were a result of amalgamation—Western educational paradigms mended to the needs of colonial bureaucracy.
As scholar Benedict Anderson has noted, nations are ‘imagined communities’, and in the Indian subcontinent this imagination held shades of Deco. Chattopadhyay observes that elites and companies who enlisted architectural firms for large-scale building projects would ‘sneak’ aspects of Deco, through furniture and interiors, into the more dominant neoclassical facades that signalled imperial power. In these manoeuvres, Deco thrived as a fugitive mode of expression, a minor note that nestled within major scales of the time championed by Lutyens, but which would inevitably rise to a frequency that could not be ignored, even as it exists in varying pitches. Sites such as Sujan Singh Park residences and the Ambassador hotel are the pristine embodiment of the prevalence of Deco, and which continue to be preserved and celebrated. The history of the Sujan Singh Park residence complex is a foundational chapter in the making of modern Delhi as we know it—shaped by the forces of empire, ‘pioneer’ mode of land development exemplified by Sobha Singh and the vagaries of Partition. Today, adjacent to the elite Khan Market and the poignant silence of the Parsi cemetery, the Park once housed refugee families during the turbulent years of Partition and its continued violence, it was also a site for tenancy contestations, the beginnings of modern renteerism, and perhaps most popularly, Khushwant Singh’s garden, known for the trees he planted—kadam and kusum, and the flower among the most beloved to the city, jasmine.
Delhi’s cinema halls have been dealt a rougher hand—Delite, which continues to function, retains its Deco façade, ornamented wallpaper and the unique tradition of lighting the ornate ceiling of the cinema hall in multi-colored hues as the movie plays. The seats and carpets have been standardised into multiplex velvet, but Deco holds its ground firmly. Built into Shahjahanabad, or the old city, Delite today stands next to both a metro line, a bustling market and the Delhi Gate, emperor Shah Jahan’s gift to the city in seventeenth century. Filmistan, on the other hand, is a shell—an abandoned relic that is shrouded in the dirt of neglect. Situated in among the oldest parts of modern Delhi that is primarily residential, the cinema shut down a few years ago and since stands as a silent vigil against the fragility of built heritage. As an extension of the Filmistan studio founded in Bombay by legendary Bollywood actor Ashok Kumar and director Shashadar Mukherjee, the cinema hall located in North Delhi had vibrancy in its design, with a palette of soft orange and vivid blue draping the exteriors, and an unparalleled graphic shape anchoring the façade. The colours and design structures remain, albeit faded and fissured by the passage of time, the empty markings built into the wall where posters would have once been placed now stand as residues of another era. Scholars such as Asher Ghertner have proposed the paradigm of ‘rule by aesthetics’ to describe the monumental transformation of cities into ‘mega-cities’ in the twenty-first century, and in the case of New Delhi, he draws attention to the construction of over seventy shopping malls, many with accompanying private cineplexes. The demise of Filmistan is a story about changes in urban governance, state control and private expansion within Delhi, and the dispensatory transformation in cinema-viewing from an activity to a bundle of consumption possibilities such as shopping and dining out, across the world. Pre-dating the Independence of India, Filmistan is a story that begins at the edges of one empire and ends on the dawn of another: the arrival of neoliberalism.
Yet, Deco endures. In New Delhi, the most prominent feature of Deco buildings is not the decorative embellishments and swirls of vintage cinema halls or the adornments of erstwhile palaces, which remain beyond the reach of ordinary citizens and interested flaneurs but features so ensconced within the elements that define the city that they appear as essential to the very idea of the city—the gentle curve. Curved balconies and edges on buildings and residences are visible from the street to passers-by, they are a democratic idiom of Deco that are seen by all, and understood, intuitively to belong to the enduring vision of the city. Afore these curved balconies, that are today markers of a deep nostalgia, on which may be found furniture in cane, wicker or bamboo, stand trees that have come to define the terrain of Delhi—amaltas, gulmohar, jamun. Adjacent to the curved balcony, one can find the central tower which holds the staircase and possibly concrete eyebrows that curve above the windows. The only flourish in these residences would be filigreed ventilators or jaalis, featuring floral or even divine motifs in a particularly Deco style; and in some cases conjoined initials that affix the name of the owner into the very make of the building.
On Pusa Road in New Delhi, residences abound with the curved balconies, supported by cylindrical towers, eyebrows that skirt and shade the windows, and minimalist geometric patterns that recur in smallest of spaces—the gaps in the handrailing. On 22 Pusa Road, this mode of Deco finds its triumph with a central tower adorned with a spectacular jaali that features an arched motif, and further a spiral staircase that winds with dramatic ascent to the terrace. As one cricks the neck to gaze above, a floral design on the ceiling pins the horizon. On the balcony railings which feature geometric jaali work of overlapping circles, sunlight dapples as a spectral visitor, filtered through branches of trees, inviting an optical leap into past times. In iterations such as these, prominent in some neighbourhoods of Delhi, the presence of Deco is neither spectacular nor stately—it is naturalised. Upon these balconies, families have basked, shaded from the harshness of summers. It is where tea has been sipped, the evening sky has settled, as it continues to do—albeit upon fractured crevices, overgrown creepers and forgotten turns. On the swivelling, vertiginid staircase of 22 Pusa Road, how many pairs of feet have climbed the steps to gaze at the moon, what musical notes have strayed past the prismatic jaali and rustled through the leaves of surrounding trees? How cinematic were the entrances of host families when the descended this staircase from their private rooms situated upstairs to greet visitors on the ground floor? How many conversations spilled into the verandas that ribboned the building? To approach Deco in the residences of Delhi, a city made first of sandstone and mehfils, is to participate to some degree in fabulist notations, to bring alive the logics and life of architectural decisions by placing archives, histories and remembrances in contact with material remnants and imagination.