An anecdote that stayed with me about Delhi was from my father-in-law, who briefly served in R&AW. It was one of those stories common across Delhi in the late 1940s and 1950s, when the city was organising the wilderness of south Delhi into residential areas and people were deciding where to set roots. His father was in the Intelligence Bureau and for years had lived in Tilak Marg near India Gate. Honoured with the Padma Shri for his service, he was also invited to live in West End Colony.
When asked, he shrugged and said, “I go to hunt rabbits there, why would I go to settle there, in the wild.”
There was jungle, there were fields and there were little thickets all over Delhi. West End was carved out of a mixture of thickets and fields from the former Basant Gaon and Munirka Gaon. Ecologically, this area was a dry, semi-arid agricultural landscape lying in the transition between Delhi’s Aravalli terrain and its alluvial plain, with rocky ground and seasonal drainage nearby. The most important architectural decision at West End may not have been the design of any individual house. It was the decision to make the space between houses part of the architecture. The neighbourhood was conceived around a continuous relationship between houses and open space, with service lanes absorbed into the open-space network. many houses had already started coming up around the 1960s While planning was under way. Somehow the common point between both those houses is the centrality of the stairway. Curved, almost performing a dance in the centre of the house, it gives the internal view a bold upward movement that lends a sense of formidability. the other chose a maximalist extravagance, solidified through the large tree in the front garden While one house’s restraint in the mouldings may be seen as leaning towards a more minimal approach. the other deliberately adds softness through moulding, cornices and built-in pelmets While one is sharper in its edges. These two houses offer a study in the modernist philosophy of the people of Delhi — in many ways, for establishing roots, the efflorescence of a global aesthetic was more important in a post-war world than a nationalistic and regional one. In the end, the two houses on that one plot remain the clearest evidence we have that Delhi’s first generation of homeowners chose to be modern through ornament and through open space together, and that they did not see the two as being in contradiction.
The land acquisition records of 1961 for land from Basant Gaon show strong evidence of a cultivated rural landscape rather than an unoccupied wilderness.
