To be or not to be rooted in the past

The past in India, as the past anywhere else in the world, is often linked with undesirable memories. The trick is to mould the past in constructive ways that takes us into the future in harmonious ways. Then, there are occasions when a past has to be imagined, created out of nothing, merely because an entirely new idea does need to be shown as if it is deeply rooted within society.

Remodelling: The govt intends to transform the Central Vista to suit its vision of India.

M Rajivlochan

Historian

Is remodelling the Central Vista in New Delhi a good thing or bad? This is a question that got sidelined as the Covid pandemic absorbed the attention of the Indians. The Narendra Modi government made no bones of its desire to transform the entire Central Vista, convert the colonial past into a museum piece, and create a new landscape, more suited to its vision of India, to house the offices of the government. The deadline for completing this task is still said to be 2024.

How can you change such a beautiful part of our colonial legacy, asked many architects, town planners and history buffs. At least one commentator even seemed to curse Modi, asserting that such grand projects always resulted in the downfall of their originator. Most of the criticism revolved around the need to preserve history, no matter that much of India suffered great horrors in colonial times.

If we were to take Jawaharlal Nehru as our guide into the processes of reconstructing India from the shambles of the Partition, then we notice that Nehru made no bones about how he perceived history to inform the creation of a new India. While we were researching our book on the social lifescape of Chandigarh, we discovered Nehru forcefully rejecting India’s past. Forget history, get on with creating the future, he seemed to say, as he inaugurated the Chandigarh project in July, 1950.

The words are immortalised on a stone slab in a non-descript garden in Sector 9 at Chandigarh. Nehru’s exact words were: “Let this be a new town, symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered by the traditions of the past. An expression of the nation’s faith in the future.” He even selected an architect who was known to reject the past, who preferred to iron away all cultural diacritical marks in order to liberate his bland cement structures from the past. That was Le Corbusier’s version of socialism.

I would say that Nehru, for all his love for history, was correct in his desire to construct something that was not tied down to the past. The past in India, as the past anywhere else in the world, is often linked with undesirable memories. The trick is to mould the past in constructive ways that takes us into the future in harmonious ways.

Then there are occasions when a past has to be imagined, created out of nothing, merely because an entirely new idea does need to be shown as if it is deeply rooted within the society.

One such example was the idea of swaraj which informed so much of the life of Indians of the early 20th century. Ananaya Vajpeyi, in her masterly history of this idea, has shown that leaders such as Nehru, Gandhi, Ambedkar and Tagore virtually created the idea of swaraj out of nothing after discovering that it did not exist in India’s culture or history. They created the idea of swaraj out of nothing merely because it was a good idea that was needed to take India and Indians forward.

In many ways, Nehru also feared India’s past. He was very distrustful of anyone else picking from India’s past to recreate the present.

At least once this resulted in an interesting clash in the public realm and Nehru was bested by a regional leader. The clash happened in the early 1950s. This was the time when India still had many politicians who had a strong political stature of their own. The clash happened between Nehru, the prime minister and Kengal Hanumanthaiah, the newly appointed chief minister of what then was called the state of Mysore. Kengal Hanumanthaiah upturned the plans of the Vidhan Soudha for which Nehru had laid the foundation stone in July 1951, during the time when K Chengalaraya Reddy was the chief minister.

Hanumanthaiah, born on February 10, 1908, was a self-made man with a peculiar past. In a state where people carried the name of their village and father as their own, Hanumanthaiah did not. His original name Dasappa was changed after the deity Sri Hanumantharaya Swamy by his grandfather Muniyappa who was the village priest. His mother added Kengal to his name in gratitude after the village where she prayed for the child when he once fell severely ill. Once he became a successful lawyer, he moved away from his village roots and married the daughter of a wealthy family of Bengaluru.

When Hanumanthaiah took over as the chief minister of Mysore, he discovered that the engineers were planning to construct a barrack like cement concrete structure for the new Vidhan Soudha. He fired the entire team despite the harsh rebuke that Nehru sent him. “I will not have this cement concrete modernist architecture to mar the honour of the state,” he would inform journalists who questioned him. They are eyesores, he would say, dismissing the modernists who were busy admiring the construction of Chandigarh.

The new design that Hanumanthaiah approved, he claimed, would be the biggest structure in India. Construction work began in March 1953. It was to be completed by 1955. Prisoners, 200 of them, from the Central Jail, were used for constructing this grand stone structure. Horrified modernists remarked that Hanumanthaiah was creating a structure that would ‘ultimately look like an enormous South Indian temple with streaks of modern architecture’.

Hanumanthaiah took a personal interest in ensuring that all work was done on time and was of an exceptionally high quality. Nehru absolutely disliked the design of the Vidhan Soudha for being so closely linked to the historical past. That gave Hanumanthaiah’s critics the necessary leverage against him. As the building got completed, Hanumanthaiah came to be targeted by his critics over the expenditure incurred in its construction. By April 1956, the 12-member Estimates Committee of the State Assembly, presided over by NC Nagaiah Reddy, said in its report that an inquiry by engineering and financial experts was ‘desirable to detect wastage’. Nagaiah Reddy was careful with words — ‘for guidance of future administrators’.

In an India where charges of corruption were routinely weaponised, this was code language for saying, let us target Hanumanthaiah. And that is precisely what happened. In a very censorious tone, Nagaiah Reddy noted: ‘It is evident that considering the utility of the building, it was unnecessary to have invested public money on architecture, decoration and other excessive comforts’. A subsequent inquiry by a retired high court judge said that the Special Engineer, Muniappa, who had been given charge of the project, had no previous experience of executing a large project. Justice Deo listed the approach roads to the Vidhan Soudha and the gardens surrounding it as examples of wasteful expenditure undertaken. ‘Unproductive works worth Rs25 lakh’, is what he concluded.

Hanumanthaiah complained that the report read ‘like the report of Miss Mayo on Mother India than an impartial appraisal of work done with devotion and sincerity’. What Hanumanthaiah failed to notice was that the opposition was not so much to the expenditure or to him personally. Rather, it was to his notion of what a grand building should look like — definitely not with elements of a Hindu temple so prominently displayed.