Mala Dayal - Celebrating Delhi

This book is a compilation of eleven lectures held at the India International Centre (IIC) over a nine-month period in 2006. Originally titled the Sir Sobha Singh Memorial Lectures, they were organized by The Attic (Amarjit Bhagwant Singh Charitable Trust) in collaboration with the IIC and INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage). In their subject matter, planning and inspiration they owed everything to informal and insightful discussions with Naina Dayal and Ravi Dayal, to whom the lecture series and now this book is dedicated.

Sobha Singh was a twenty-two-year-old contractor working on the KalkaSimla railroad when he visited Delhi in 1911. He was present at the Delhi Darbar at which King George V declared that the capital of British India would be shifted from Calcutta to Delhi. He saw his opportunity and took it.

Rarely was a man so identified with the birth of a city as Sir Sobha Singh was with New Delhi, translating into sandstone and marble most of the imperial blueprints of Lutyens and Baker. Few builders in the world have left behind as tributes to their genius such an imposing list of edifices encompassing most of the colonial face of Delhi as he has done, says Khushwant Singh.

The original introduction to the series of lectures is as good an introduction to the book as it was to the lectures: This series of lectures encompasses many facets of the life of Delhiits history, architecture, cuisine, music, environment, and the arts.

The first lecture (and article) My Father the Builder by Khushwant Singh, author, historian and raconteur, set the tone and style for the series. His celebrity status ensured a huge audience with more people who couldnt get in to hear him than those who did. At the age of ninety, his memory was undimmed, his style elegant, his scholarship undoubted and his humour undiminished. This is a first-hand account of the building of New Delhi and the important role his father Sir Sobha Singh played in its construction. He talks of the building of this imperial city which he witnessed rising in front of my eyes set against the backdrop of the personalities, English and Indian, who made it possible.

Most of us see Delhi as a city of imposing medieval forts, palaces and tombs. But Upinder Singh in Discovering the Ancient in Modern Delhi strongly believes that the less sexy ancient remains, the broken bits of pottery, the prehistoric stone tools, the glazed earthenware and the stone pillars tell an equally fascinating story. She suggests that the antiquity of the Purana Qila could go back to 1000 BC and may even be linked to the legendary city of Indraprastha mentioned in the Mahabharata. Excavations in the villages of Anangpur, Kharkhari Nahar, Bhorgarh and Mandoli of the National Capital Region of Delhi have revealed that they were stone age and Harappan sites. She says that with a cultivated sensibility ordinary ancient remains can be animated by imagination.