Two memorials for the Mahatma

It was 64 years ago today that Mohandas Gandhi (known as Mahatma, the great soul) was murdered by a Hindu extremist, who believed Gandhi had been too sympathetic to the Muslim cause during the British withdrawal from India.

Delhi has two Gandhi memorials, one the site of his cremation at Raj Ghat, in a park on the banks of the Yamuna river where several other Indian leaders have since been commemorated, and the other at Birla House, in New Delhi, where he was shot.

I visited both places with friends last week, seeking to commemorate Gandhi quietly and away from the grand ceremonies that today will mark the anniversary of his death.

The site at Raj Ghat (literally the riverbank of the king or leader) was designed by Vanu G. Bhuta, an American-trained Indian architect who won the Government-sponsored competition to create a suitable memorial to Gandhi. His was a stark, modernist solution, intended to reflect the profound austerity of Gandhi’s life. The design, which was completed around 1956, is a square, sunken garden, surrounded by walls that serve as viewing platforms. In the centre of the garden is a raised, black marble slab, decorated solely with an engraving of the phrase “He Ram” [Oh God], supposedly Gandhi’s last words, and an eternal flame burning in a large lantern.

Originally the surrounding garden was red earth, but it has been changed several times since its installation and is now British-style grass punctuated with trees planted by visiting foreign dignitaries (from Queen Elizabeth II and Dwight Eisenhower to Ho Chi Minh).  When we visited last week, we admired the proportions and scale of the garden, and the way it can be experienced first in a broad sweep from above, and then intimately (and barefoot) at the memorial itself. The bright marigold petals add a typically Hindu touch (and on occasions the whole memorial is smothered in patterns of flower petals). For me, however, the dignity and repose of the space were somewhat spoilt by the bright green matting laid for mysterious reasons over many of the stone paths, and by the retractable barriers that discouraged visitors from getting too close to the memorial.

The second Gandhi memorial in Delhi is at Birla House, where Gandhi was shot. It is now a national museum, known as the Gandhi Smriti.

I had read of the footprints cast in stone marking his final walk from the house to a planned prayer meeting. But the reality was disappointing: the footprints were not, as I had imagined, gently sunken into the earth, as if preserving the exact tread of his final few steps. Instead, they are oddly raised and too numerous to bring much poignancy to the site  -  and apparently any child who sees them as an invitation to walk in Gandhi’s footsteps is quickly disabused of the idea by the museum guards. The whole site seemed to me slightly dispiriting: I’ve written elsewhere about its surfeit of information boards, and the much-trumpeted interactive displays in the house were one of the strangest museum experiences I have had.

For me, the memorial garden at Raj Ghat, ideally shorn of its bright matting and barriers, is a far finer way to commemorate the founder of the Indian nation.

Problems in Paradise

Kerala is one of the most beautiful Indian states. Its tourism department has adopted the slogan “God’s own country” to trumpet its perfect climate, the lushness of its landscapes, its long history and splendidly varied culture.

We were there over Christmas and were enchanted by our experiences. But, like so many places, Kerala is facing environmental challenges and conflicts between natural resources and local livelihoods. Here are three examples that struck me.

Kerala is famous for its waterways, for the vast beauty of lake Vembanad and over five hundred miles of canal that make up its navigable backwaters. The banks of the canals are lush with coconut palm, the water full of luxuriant floating plants. But soon we noticed that those floating plants were too exuberant, too ubiquitous, too uniform… We recognised them as water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes), a plant native to South America and innocuously common in northern European ponds.

Introduced into tropical places such as the Keralan backwaters, water hyacinth is an exotic invasive second to none. Spreading by runners and seed, a population of this plant can double in size every two weeks. It is choking these internationally significant wetlands, preventing navigation and fishing, clogging irrigation systems, and crowding out native species.

Encouragingly, in an effort to eradicate the problem, and to make use of the mass of unwanted plant material, the Keralan government is piloting a project to harvest the abundant water hyacinth and turn it into an alternative energy source. It will be interesting to see whether or not it succeeds.

A very different issue is the amazing popularity of the Keralan kettuvallam  or houseboat as a means for tourists to explore the state’s tranquil backwaters. Originally these boats were designed for grain transportation, principally for the rice grown in profusion in the waterside paddy fields. Ecologically designed and propelled only by poles, the boats gradually fell into disfavour as traders came to prefer roads as a faster transport option. Then an Indian businessman had the bright idea of converting some of the boats for tourists’ use. It seemed a good idea: preserving these beautiful heritage crafts through giving them a new purpose. But conversion of course included adding Western staples such as flushing toilets, electricity and petrol engines. Given the staggering popularity of the boats (the number operating out of a single port expanded over four years from fifteen to almost four hundred), the local government has been struggling to tackle the consequent pollution, congestion and eco-system disruption.

One final example: the iconic Chinese fishing nets that are found along Fort Kochi’s shorelines. Like elegant hammocks, the vast bamboo and teak structures are lowered into the water by a team of five or six fishermen, and then raised a few minutes later using a complex system of large stones and ropes as counterbalances. There is something captivating about the unhurried rhythm of the movements.

Probably brought to Kerala by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, sadly today the nets have high maintenance costs and an increasingly poor catch, as modern dredgers collect most of the available fish before it reaches the shoreline. This lack of commercial viability means that only twenty or so of the nets now remain, and their future seems uncertain. Yet they are the most photographed feature of Kerala and are, in many ways, a symbol of the state. The fishermen have long argued that the government should support their continued use, as an important part of Keralan heritage and culture, and in the last few weeks it has looked as if they may get their wish. The local tourism council, working with the heritage body INTACH, has announced plans to provide subsidised teak to the fishermen, to reduce the heavy maintenance costs of the nets. Whether this will be enough – and whether it is a good idea to support economically non-viable practices just because they are traditional and attractive to tourists  – is a question for another day.

Seasons Greetings from Kerala

We spent Christmas morning with friends on a rice boat in the backwaters of this beautiful south Indian state. It felt like paradise on earth.

But, like almost everywhere, Kerala is facing environmental challenges and conflicts between natural resources and local livelihoods. I will write more soon on what we learnt, and would like to take this moment to send slightly belated but very warm and sunny Christmas greetings to everyone who stops by this blog.

Preserving memories

My favourite definition of the word preserve is to “to maintain or keep alive a memory or quality.”

It sounds so simple – and yet in reality of course the process of historical preservation throws up impossible challenges. Here are three very different approaches to the preservation of iconic medieval sites. All have their undeniable appeal; all have their unacceptable downsides. See which one you like best.

First, Tughlaqabad, an extraordinary 14th century site to the south of Delhi, where in just three or four years the Sultan (and former slave) Ghiyas-ud-Din Tughlaq constructed a new citadel – a vast, impregnable symbol of the dynasty he founded. Yet on his death, the place was believed cursed, soon abandoned, and never again served a role in the Delhi Sultanate. Now, just remnants remain – a wall here, a gateway there, these fragments of a once-great city being slowing subsumed back into nature, calling to mind the legend of Ozymandias.

The Indian authorities have called it a “symbol of lost heritage” and there are those who would berate them for allowing it to fall into such a state of ruin. Important as it is historically, Tughlaqabad has been denied the chance of world heritage status because there is simply not enough of the city left.

Yet the contemporary visitor to this site feels a great sense of the history of this place, of its antiquity, the inexorable passage of time, and the brief, mistaken hopes and dreams of its creator.

Next, let’s look at the Great Wall of China, in reality a series of fortifications commenced in the 5th century BC, with what remains today largely from the time of the Ming Dynasty (14th century onwards). While many parts are completely lost or in ruins, masonry sections near Beijing have been extensively renovated and serve as major tourist attractions. In complete contrast to Tughlaqabad, these are so fully restored and carefully maintained that they give a strong sense of how the walls must have looked when they were first constructed centuries ago.

Indeed they have been condemned as too “picture perfect” – appearing to have been built yesterday, and offering no sense of antiquity or what Ruskin called “that golden stain of time.” With their ski-lifts up to get up and toboggans to get back down, the walls can feel like a Disney version of Chinese history.

And for my third example, the Hindu temples of Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh, created by the Chandella dynasty between 950 and 1050 AD. Twenty or so of these soaring, intricate buildings have survived over the centuries, and have recently been designated a world heritage site. (These days, they are probably best known and visited for their sexually explicit carvings.)

After the Chandella dynasty declined, the temples were largely forgotten and, by the nineteenth century, the site had been reclaimed by the surrounding jungle. Only the local villagers remembered the existence of the temples and one day told of them to a young British captain in the Bengal Engineers. The British then cleared away the trees and restored what they described as “these splendid monuments of antiquity,” with replacement sections clearly differentiated by their colour from original material.

Nowadays such an approach is often seen as aesthetically unpleasing and unnecessary, a disfigurement of the original appearance of the site. Yet there is arguably an honesty in the way new material does not pretend to be old, and a pleasure in the way visitors are thus reminded of the history of the temples, their virtual loss and dramatic recovery, and the role of the British in preserving many sites of cultural heritage during the Raj.

So where is memory or quality best maintained? Is it in the deliberately patched temples, or the perfectly renovated wall, or the fortifications gradually fading into oblivion?

Wildlife and gardens

Having lived on three continents, I am increasingly struck by the similarities and connections between gardens in seemingly very disparate countries. What confirms my location is not the plants or the layout or the use people make of the landscape – but the wildlife.

In Massachusetts, it was raccoons trotting along the tops of fences, the mongoose on the doorstep, and the occasional skunk lurking in the shrubbery that told me I was no longer in England. [One eagle-eyed reader has pointed out that native Bostonians would have been equally amazed by the mongoose; it was probably in fact an opossum.] A friend who lived only two hours north of Boston could entertain me for hours with tales of the moose and bears in her cornfield. It was as if she was on personal terms with space aliens. When we were in Paris, I was struck by the complete absence of grey squirrels in any park or garden, even though we were under three hours by train from the squirrel-laden London parks. Now in India, it’s the monkeys who confirm I am indeed a long way from home.

Last week I spent some time up on the northern ridge, researching the impact of the British on the Indian capital. The ridge is an ancient geological feature that runs diagonally across the city and was home to various grand colonial figures in the nineteenth century, and site of much of the action during the 1857 Uprising. Originally scrubland, it has for a hundred years been managed as forest. It is neatly planted, with park benches, wide paths, fences and litter bins. In the softer light of the Indian autumn, you could almost imagine you were in the UK (although the bougainvillaea slightly gives the game away).

It’s the bundi monkeys everywhere who are the real signal. To locals they may be nuisances who rip up gardens and carry TB, but to me they are an otherworldly joy, frolicking and leaping and just gathering in big social groups, in the same way that the jaunty raccoons never failed to delight in the States, even while locals muttered about vermin and rabies.

Fellow blogger Jack at Sequoia Gardens writes about the baboons who occasionally wreak havoc in his South African garden, and I find myself relishing the unfamiliarity of his homeland in a way that descriptions of similarly native species like phygelius or crocosmia would just not achieve.

So I am grateful to our little urban monkeys, desperately displaced as they are from their native habitat by human encroachment, for reminding me daily that, despite the clipped shrubs and English-style lawn that cover so much of Delhi, this really is a different country.

One approach to sustainable garden design

The India Habitat Centre recently hosted an event led by noted French landscape architect Pascal Cribier. Called Garden, Nature or Landscape?, the workshop allowed Cribier to explain his design approach through a variety of projects.

For me, the most fascinating part of the day was Cribier’s description of what ecological design means to him. (He spoke poetically and passionately on the subject in his broken English, and would I suspect not entirely approve of this short and rather prosaic Anglo-Saxon summary of his views.)

Put simply, Cribier argued for the conservation of gardens. Not conservation in the usual sense of meticulously recording and expensively safeguarding important historical features; but conservation simply in the sense of keeping as much as possible of what was already on site. He does not believe in adding to landfill by ripping out plants and materials just to impose his own design on a garden. Instead he strives to keep what is there and just amend it. He gave the simple example of a brick wall which he did not like; instead of replacing it, he used the same bricks to build a wall in a different style. A more flamboyant example was a fussy little Victorian water feature he found in the garden he was redesigning at Woolton House in England, which he extended into a far more effective large pond while keeping the original feature at the centre.

A conserved but transformed water feature at Woolton House. Image from www.etab.ac-caen.fr

There was a second, equally important, part of this approach. Cribier also strives to create a design that will last, that will not in its turn get ripped out as uninspiring or too difficult to maintain. He almost starts with what he considers a realistic maintenance plan and works backwards. And his focus is on producing something that the owner and gardener will love and want to maintain; in this way the garden is more likely to persist.

Several of the young Indian landscape architects in the room pressed him on his use of non-native plants. But Cribier was unrepentant: it was ecologically more important to give clients a pleasurable garden that they would love and preserve, than to strive to recreate some lost ecosystem. He argued that nature is self-balancing, able to cope with disruption and change, and not in need of frantic attempts to return to what has been lost. To be fair, he did say that if France’s native flora was as beautiful as India’s, his attitude would be rather different; but providing enduring beauty was more important than a focus on native plants.

It was a fascinating account of one individual’s approach; not one I am sure I fully support (and certainly his argument that bees will visit hybridised double flowers as readily as native single ones seemed based on nothing more than a fervent wish that they should), but one which left all of us pondering on what really is good ecological practice in garden design.

Old Mughal structures and new British lawns

In our first few weeks in India, we have seen several examples of ancient Hindu or Mughal architecture surrounded by gardens that turn out to be partly or largely twentieth century British. I’ve already posted about the controversial gardens at Lodi, from where two villages were relocated in the 1930s to allow an English-style park to be installed.

Next up, the sixteenth century Humayun’s Tomb, one of the most beautiful and significant sites in Delhi, and an inspiration for the Taj Mahal. Arranged symmetrically around the elevated marble tomb, its grounds retain the four-square layout of the traditional paradise garden. But the sandstone of the rills and many of the planting choices apparently date to a British restoration carried out in the first decade of the twentieth century, itself intended to correct an earlier British intervention that had replaced Mughal water features with Victorian circular flower beds.

The red and white marble of Humayun's garden tomb, with the sandstone rills and planting added later by the British

An aerial photograph of Humayun's Tomb, showing the grid layout of the gardens. Image on display at the site.

At the Agra Fort, a World Heritage Site 200km south of Delhi, we learnt that the lawns and planting around and within the stronghold (which was constructed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) were again put in place by the Brits, establishing grass and shrubs where formerly had been paved and carpeted gathering spaces.

British shrubs and grass at the Agra Fort

Twentieth century lawn inserted among seventeenth century buildings at the Agra Fort

The Taj Mahal was also influenced by its time under British management. While the exact layout and planting of its original gardens in the seventeenth century are not known, there are early descriptions of the monument surrounded by a profusion of roses, daffodils and fruit trees. As part of a major conservation programme, the gardens were replanted in 1903 in a more Western style, with lawns and clumps of trees.

Irregular clumps of trees and lawn adjacent to the Taj Mahal

English-style grass long established in the grounds of the Taj Mahal

All these horticultural and design changes were part of well-meaning efforts to restore or enhance crumbling historic sites. Some would now argue that much of this work was inappropriate, examples of misguided attempts at restoration by people who did not understand the culture of the country or the history of its landscapes. (It makes me wonder which conservation projects of today will in future years be seen as ill-judged or unwise, introducing incongruous elements or removing historically significant features.)

Yet gardens are always going to change over time. For me, one of their joys is the layers of history that they contain, with designs and planting from different periods jostling and intermingling around the largely static architecture. The British are just one of many influences on Indian landscapes, and there is a certain pleasure in seeing their (our) brief, particular impact.

American modernism in Delhi

The US architect Joseph Allen Stein (1912 – 2001) spent the last forty years of his professional life in India. A man driven by humanitarian and environmental passions, he worked on cooperative and low-cost social housing in California and then, troubled by McCarthyism, he took up work in Calcutta and later Delhi, exhilarating in the idealism and socialist enthusiasm of India as it emerged from almost a century of colonial British rule.

Inspired by the work of modernist architect Richard Neutra and others, Stein has been described as “building in the garden” – using the wider natural landscape to inspire appropriate structures made from local materials. He characterised his approach as “modern regionalism” and it can perhaps be seen as a precursor of today’s achingly trendy landscape urbanism movement.

Yesterday we visited one of Stein’s major buildings, the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi. Designed in the late 1980s, this is a place that provides office, conference and exhibition space for organisations working on habitat- and environment-related issues.

The design reminded me forcibly of London’s Barbican. It is monumental in scale, with concrete structures arranged in vast horizontal and vertical slabs, laid out around large airy courtyards, linked together by stairs and walkways. Given the heat of the Indian summer, many of the exterior spaces are shaded by delicate blue patio covers, casting intricate shadows and further blurring the distinction between inside and out. The courtyards are planted with a pleasing array of greenery – large pots and beds of evergreen shrubs and tall trees, providing a more human feel and scale amongst the concrete monumentality. Although rarely credited, Stein’s wife Margaret was responsible for much of the interior and planting design in his work, and the successful combination of their two styles is well illustrated at the Habitat Centre.

It was Stein who brought Garrett Eckbo to Delhi to work on Lodi Gardens (about which I blogged below), and who also designed the splendid American Embassy school attended by my daughter. Joe and Margaret Stein are a couple whose work I intend to research further.

Lodi Gardens

We are ten days into our three-year Indian sojourn and finding much to enjoy, and much that has us floundering.

Yesterday, in soul-sapping heat, we visited one of our local parks in New Delhi, the Lodi Gardens. At first, it looks simply like a lush green area amid the chaos of the city. There are venerable old trees, whose names we are just learning – the ashoka, with brilliant orange flowers, the fragrant neem, and the banyan, with its fat aerial roots. Among the lawns at Lodi are beds of cannas and other exotic plants, and some clipped little shrubs that look to me rather stumpy and mean in the great sweep of grass.

And then suddenly, as we turned a corner, we found the heart of the Lodi Gardens. Among the greenery are a number of unutterably beautiful stone monuments. The names and history of these ancient garden tombs, mosques, walls, gateways and bridges mean little to us as yet, but helpful signs told us that some were constructed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by the Sayyid and Lodi dynasties, and that some are later, Mughal structures.

Lodi is in the midst of a major programme of preservation. But nothing is being made shiny and new. Instead the work is retaining the ancient character of the monuments by just carefully conserving what is left.

The 90-acre gardens themselves were a much later creation, added by the British during the Raj. Lady Willingdon, wife of the British Viceroy, decided that parkland would be nice around these ancient monuments, and in in 1936 had the two surrounding villages removed, and the undulating lawn and pathways of a typical English park installed in their place. Apparently in the 1960s the gardens were re-landscaped with help from American designer Garrett Eckbo.

And so Lodi reflects many of the dynasties and cultural influences that have shaped this great city; today it is one of the most popular parks in New Delhi, and one  that I am sure we shall grow to love.

All the world’s a stage…

The théâtre de verdure du jardin Shakespeare is a delightful open air theatre in the Bois de Boulogne, to the west of Paris. Last month we saw Macbeth there in a dramatic performance by the Tower Theatre Company. It was my 8-year-old daughter’s first taste of Shakespeare and, after grappling with the arcane language for a while, she declared it enjoyable.

I very much liked the setting, with its different areas planted to represent various Shakespeare scenes – from a heath for Macbeth’s witches and the brook where Ophelia drowns to a woodland for a Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The stage itself is a splendid affair, with a mass of different entrances and exits, and all sorts of narrow paths and steps for the cast to gamble around. Underfoot is gravel, which apparently requires daily sword fight practice to avoid the characters loosing their footing and producing rather more “blood and death” than intended. Altogether it is a delightful enclosed space, worth a visit even if no performance is scheduled.

As a Brit in Paris, I think a post about Shakespeare in the Bois de Boulogne is as good a way as any to pause this blog for a while. We leave France in a couple of days and, after some time in the UK, will be setting off for our new adventure in India in early August. I hope very much to return in the autumn with stories of Mughal landscapes and colonial parks and ancient garden tombs…