When North meets South

So how good are we in logging our history? After skimming through the recently published “Sentinels of Raisina Hill”, your response may well be in negative. And rightly so. The 144-pager coffee-table book (Timeless Books) quite efficiently drives home the point that even after 65 years of the end of British rule in India, we needed individual efforts to brick together vital blocks of history relating to the creation of New Delhi as the Capital city.

On the occasion of the completion of the hundredth year of the making of New Delhi in 2011, a number of books, mostly coffee-table, came out in print. So did “The Sentinels of Raisina Hill”. The book, however, stands out, primarily because of the originality of its subject — penning for the first time the making of North and South Blocks, the 700 high-ceilinged rooms perched on a man-made hillock from where a litany of bureaucrats and ministers alike virtually run the world's largest democracy. Having worked at these Blocks, being familiar with their span, the authors — former Home Secretary Dhirendra Singh and Mohan Joseph, a civil servant with the Union Finance Ministry — certainly found a grip on the subject but the idea actually spewed out of a discovery, literally!

The discovery was the first stones of New Delhi laid by King George V and Queen Mary, locked-up in two chambers of the North and South Blocks with their keys missing. And the discoverer was Mohan Joseph.

Reels back Joseph, “When I was at the former President K.R. Narayanan's Secretariat, he asked me to bring out a book on Rashtrapati Bhavan. While researching for it, I discovered the commemorative stones in the chambers of North and South Blocks, once used as a storehouse. Nobody had the keys and we had to break open the doors.” Later in 2004, Joseph assisted the Union Home Ministry in the restoration of these chambers and came to know his co-author Dhirendra Singh. “We decided to co-write a book on the history of North and South Blocks since there was none. But years went by. Since 2011 was the 100th year of New Delhi, Singh told me, ‘it is now or never',” adds Joseph.

A lot of thinking went into making the book worthy of a gaze. Relates Singh, “We didn't want a typical coffee-table book with huge pictures. Anyway, there are as many pictures on the subject, long overused.” He remembered being impressed, years ago, by a book on the chateaus of France with sketches. So sketches (by Vikram Kalra) replaced photographs here, embellishing the colour schemes of the book — rust, black and white (“The rust is to signify the sandstones of North and South Blocks”).

The research work took the duo to the School of Planning and Architecture library (for the North and South Blocks architect Herbert Baker's memoirs), to Central Secretariat (for the official history of the 1911 Delhi Durbar and Lord Hardinge's memoirs) and to Charles Lutyens, the grand nephew of Edwin Lutyens (for a copy of Mary Lutyens' biography of her father.)

What readers meet on its pages are fascinating slivers of history: the role Lord Hardinge played in building New Delhi, the pressure Lutyens' put to wrest the contract of building the city, the serious disagreements Lutyens had with Baker's decision to back Hardinge's plan to have Indian influences in the North and South Blocks. Baker brought in motifs of elephants, cows and lions, jaalis, fountains, the Ashok Chakra, keeping local sensibilities in mind. It also talks of an initial plan to bring labourers from the martial tribes tagged “Crimms” (criminals) by the British. Also, the cash crunch due to World War 1 and that both Baker and Lutyens didn't return to see the progress of work for about two years.

The well-researched book devote space to its frescoes too, “on Baker trying to revive the dying culture of mural painting in India”, and the inscriptions, one of them in Persian, which they got translated into English.

The book ends beautifully, turning the two sentinels of Raisina Hill characters, alive with words. They are heard mourning their loss of architectural value with the departure of the British but every January 29 when the Beating Retreat takes place, they admit feeling proud. To commemorate them, Joseph and Singh however, hope that the Home Ministry lets open the chambers with the commemorative stones for visitors. “Also, a plaque should be put to identify them and Delhi Tourism does publicity so that tourists know about them.”