The institution of police wanted a memorial to celibrate its achievements and commemorate its sacrifices - what better way than to erect a monumnet; this is the time tesetd procedure. But it seems to have chosen a wrong location - somewhere not beyond the boondocks but in the middle of what is fashionably called the Lutyen's (the architect given credit for the institutional area in colonial Delhi) Bungalow Zone (LBZ) - this ares sports an ante-bellum look. The heritage police is up in arms - the mounument just does not mesh with the character, architecture ... (all architectural mumbo jumbo) and the Home Ministry of the Central Governement has acquiesced and the half-built monument is coming down (taking with it Rs. 160 million already spent on it - about $3.5 m). What the Home Minsitry did under a different political formation has now undone it. This is the start and stop procedure we adopt (but I am digressing).
I have a sneaky suspicion that the opposition to the Police Memorial stems from local vis-à-vis zone-wide aesthetic and immediate temporal vis-à-vis historical considerations. When the glass pyramid of I M Pei can be allowed in the courtyard of the Louvre I don't see why not the Police Memorial in the LBZ. Just Google "Ferris Wheel" + "Big Ben" and you get dozens of pictures showing the Big Ben through the London Eye ferris wheel. If this combination is not aesthetically dissonant, how can the Police Memorial in the LBZ be? By the way, as per rules, did/do the architects of various embassies and commissions along Shanti Path (the emabssy road / enclave) have to get explicit heritage permissions for their buildings? If no, why then this memorial? If yes, how can this memorial be considered any uglier than many of the buildings? Something is seriously wrong here.
Heritage is not simply history but has a forward looking component also. We should leave to subsequent generations our own vision and efforts melded with what we inherited. Has not the Eiffel Tower, built for no purpose other than that it can be, been accepted? The French are proud of the visage of that particular industrial heritage. The Police Memorial has a loftier purpose and it is a crying shame that it is not recognized as our heritage (please don't' argue that 'you are free to build it any place else' – 'equal but separate' justifications went out the window with the Brown v Board of Education judgment of the US Supreme Court, admittedly on an entirely different matter, but the logic stands). I know this is a cry in wilderness.
Raghuram Ekambaram
No comments:
Post a Comment