DIGITAL COPY ON MAGZTERLife in the scarred, often unhealed tissue of Delhi
was also the background from which I had come.
I had grown up in a city built on invasion and
decline. Death was etched in the undergrowth
of history, decay built into buildings – not in
the Roman understanding of antiquity, but as
a formula for life itself. In every Delhi – from
Mughal times to the present – buildings were
old before their time; new buildings looked
old even before they were finished. I couldn’t
understand how life could be constructively lived
in surroundings of such perennial decay. How do
you plan your future when the past and present
were festering and crumbling?
When a city’s cultural past is given greater value
than the present, the decline is obviously more
visible, more real and rapid. Much of Delhi’s
literature, poetry, music and architecture – its
mixed culture of Sufism, Hinduism and Islam –
once reverberated against the pastel faded walls
of its many ruins, but can now unfortunatelyonly be viewed in tragic light; their time had
passed. Delhi’s nostalgic, frequently evocative life
of Mughal courts, miniature art, culinary treats
and scented gardens, were all reminders of its
long lost grace. People who once connected with
it were now in a pleasant state of bereavement,
unfamiliar with urban values long gone. The
settled city of the past had become a city of
refugees, a place, both hell and heaven, fearful,
but with possibility of future redemption. Delhi
continues to relive that history of migration. The
families that arrived after Independence, and the
Partition, learnt to bear the cruelty of surviving
the long difficult move. Music, art and culture
were farthest from their mind. What mattered
was the break with history and the wish to start
afresh, however desperate. Surrounded by the
effigies of ruin, the new migrants see nothing
of the pleasurable background of the old, just a
deadly parasitical reality, and one of their own
making.Wallpaper architecture, Gautam Bhatia, 2011, 12" x 10", Watercolour on Paper(^102) / arts illustrated / feb 2016 - mar 2016 /IAF - Delhi Connecting Art