Mughal Gardens to Amrit Udyan: Lost in the renaming is a sense of Delhi’s history

Place names are the stuff of history. Some recall forgotten geographies, others are tributes to individuals who have been associated with the place. Landscapes bear the signature of the artist/architect/designer

Renaming roads and gardens in the British capital of New Delhi will not make them any less part of the City Beautiful and Garden City movements of the USA and Europe of 100 years ago. (Express/Amit Mehra)

Written by: Narayani Gupta

6 min readNew DelhiJan 31, 2023 10:34 PM IST First published on: Jan 29, 2023 at 08:32 PM IST

Two months ago, the Garden Museum in London held an exhibition of the paintings of Constance Villiers-Stuart (1877–1966), called “Earthly Delights”. In 1913, Villiers-Stuart had published a small and beautifully evocative book, The Gardens of the Great Mughals, which inspired the Town-Planning Committee (appointed in 1912) to introduce terraces and water-bodies borrowed from Mughal gardens in Kashmir in the garden of the Viceroy’s House. Horticulture innovations or borrowed ideas are traditionally acknowledged, as seen in “Japanese”/“Chinese” gardens in European cities. This was why the vast garden was named the “Mughal” Gardens, though designed by English landscape architects.

Today, in a trend we have become familiar with, it has been renamed. A double whammy, the Mughals and the British knocked out in one stroke! (It was similar in 2018 when the name of Mughalsarai, a railway junction created in 1862, was changed to Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction; but the word “Mughal” had been invented by the British, and the dynasty had no connection with the place). We await the day when we are informed that Edwin Lutyens had nothing to do with the Rashtrapati Bhavan, it was built by sthapatis from Sanchi, just as the Lal Qila was built by the Tomars.

Express Explained | The different styles that came together to form Mughal Gardens, now Amrit Udyan

Place names are the stuff of history, the details that tell a story or light up a section of the Kashmiri carpet that is Indian history. Some recall forgotten geographies, others are tributes to individuals who have been associated with the place. An example of the former — South End Road indicated the southern limit of New Delhi. By changing it to Rajesh Pilot Marg that sense is lost. Of the latter — the eminent Malayalam-Sanskrit scholar, K K Nair, whose pen-name was “Krishna Chaitanya”, lived on a road in Hauz Khas which then was named for him until some official “corrected” it to “Sri Krishna Chaitanya Mahaprabhu Marg”. The residents of Masjid Moth changed the name of their “colony” to Greater Kailash-3, arguing that people living as far off as Texas had heard of Greater Kailash. But the old name is the one still used. In 2007, Sindhusree Khullar, the dynamic chairman of the NDMC, had agreed to sponsor a booklet/location boards with “old” and “new” names, but she was transferred before she could put it into action.

Landscapes are not neutral — they bear the signature of the artist/architect/designer. Middle-class Indians are travelling to more and more countries all over the world. Should they not enjoy recognising connections — in flowers, in furniture designs, in textile and carpet motifs, apart from the two areas which they are well up on — cuisine and clothing styles.

A lecture on Saturday, on Delhi in the last half-century of Mughal rule, drew a packed audience. People, one senses, are hungry for history. This was not the case 50 years ago. Delhi, with its much smaller population, had many more people who were familiar with its history and architecture. The history was kept alive with Sunday picnics to monuments being a popular pastime. The growing city had large islands of Jats, many “colonies” of Punjabis, “South Indians” and Bengalis, but the language of the shahar was treated with respect: Urdu poetry was popular, its songs happily understood…

Today, the city is navigated with google-maps, transit journeys are by metro, so that the intervening landscape is not seen, and the city is “explored” with the help of guides. Urdu is conflated with “Muslim” and with “Pakistan” (a senior professor in Europe, whose mother-tongue was Hindi, described the word ‘zubaan’ as ‘Muslim’!) and yet the songs replete with Urdu terms remain stubbornly popular! and yet the timeless songs that use Urdu words remain so popular.

Lahore and Delhi are twin Mughal cities; Delhi, in addition, is a Rajput and Sultanate city. Vestiges of these pasts, and of the British presence, are scattered all over. And why? Because earlier regimes did not rename older landscapes or buildings, they built near them.

From Express Archive | From Meluha to Hindustan, the many names of India and Bharat

Renaming roads and gardens in the British capital of New Delhi will not make them any less part of the City Beautiful and Garden City movements of the USA and Europe of 100 years ago. It would be far more challenging to build a new city, and leave New Delhi to the CPWD and the ice-cream carts. The CPWD will never change in its functioning, and the people of Delhi will do a Chipko Andolan for their ice-cream. And they will queue up in February to rush through the Mughal Gardens, furtively plucking the occasional tulip. I have walked on Kingsway munching chana from paper cones in the 1950s; I have been tempted by garish handkerchiefs spread out by hawkers on the Boat Club lawns in the 1960s; I have enjoyed strolling from the Archives to the bus-stop on tranquil evenings in the 1970s; I have led noisy groups of children up Raisina Hill in the 1980s… So much to be grateful for.

Delhi, shrug your shoulders and continue to welcome us all in. Remember, you have many gates for entry, none for exit. And among those who enter, there are butterflies. At one end of the Mughal Gardens is the round pool, surrounded by rings of flower beds — the Lutyens’ “Butterfly garden”. They will always be there, whether you call them titli or butterfly.

The writer is a historian of Delhi