T
HE ENGLISH garden legacy put down roots in India long before that nation achieved independence in 1947. In 1843 Baron von Orlich noted that the rajah of Bhurtpore, installed and educated by East India Company officials, had laid out “an uncommonly pleasant villa, surrounded by four small flower-gardens . . . solely for the use of the English who visit him.” Other rajahs followed his lead, no doubt aware that this was a good way to curry favor with their rulers but perhaps intrigued also by exotic motifs, as Lucknow’s rulers had been. Maharaja Sayajirao III brought over a gardener from Kew to design the gardens for his Indo-Saracenic palace of Laxmi Vilas in Baroda, described by one commentator as “laid out like a Willow Pattern tea set”: neat walkways, flowerbeds, and a trelliswork summerhouse inspired by Victorian glass conservatories (Fig. 53). In 1927 the Nawab of Rampur held a garden party for the viceroy, Lord Irwin, who in fact hated garden parties. Irwin commented that the Nawab had delusions of grandeur, laying out gardens on the scale of Versailles with “great vistas of lawn and trees and fountains and what not.”1 The novelist Louis Bromfield knew whereof he wrote with his word-picture of the Maharaja of Ranchipur’s palace park: “The park itself, with banyans and mangoes and eucalyptus trees and palms taking the place of the elms and oaks and cedars of an English park, was no less fantastic than the palace. In the beginning the Scotch gardener employed by the Maharani had tried, stubbornly and with heroism, to make English plants and shrubs and trees grow in the reddish heavy soil, but in the end India would have none of them and one by one they shriveled and died beneath the burning sun.”2
Fig. 53. Laxmi Vilas Palace, southeast view, Baroda, 1895.
Curzon Collection, photographer unknown
[The British Library Board, Photo 430/24(16)]
Gardens as Public Spaces
From princely garden to public park proved a short step. By the time the grounds of the Victoria Memorial Hall were opened in 1921, the idea of the public park was no longer a novelty. The gardens of precolonial India had been the resort of elites, both Hindu and Muslim, open at very rare times to the public, such as the anniversary of Mumtaz Mahal’s death in the case of the Taj. In Great Britain access to the great gardens was largely a nineteenth-century phenomenon. When Paxton’s gardens at Chatsworth were open to all on bank holidays, special trains brought visitors from all over the Midlands. Civic-minded Victorians went beyond this, creating public parks in London and throughout the provinces as places of wholesome recreation, with sports grounds and lakes for boating, vast greenswards, and acres of brilliant carpet bedding.
In India it became the mark of an enlightened ruler to follow suit. Maharaja Ganga Singh of Bikaner, for example, laid out a thirty-five-acre public park early in the twentieth century. Like English parks, it had its monuments: at the same time that a Tower of Glory recalled the past feats of Bikaner arms, the Queen Empress Gates, Minto Terrace, and Egerton Tank (Egerton had been the Maharaja’s old tutor) reminded strollers of present colonial realities. Baroda, too, boasted a public park, described by Sir Edwin Arnold in 1886 as “a charming expanse of flower-gardens, lawns, and pools, established for the use and enjoyment of the citizens.” In Jaipur, Maharaja Ram Singh surrounded Swinton Jacob’s Indo-Saracenic Albert Hall—a “vast and awful museum”—with lovely ornamental gardens.3
The Sajjan Niwas Bagh in Udaipur began as a private park-cum-botanic garden but was opened to the public about the same time as that in Bikaner. The garden consisted of formal beds running along an extensive, if problematic, lawn, and it pioneered the introduction of English annuals and vegetables to Rajasthan. It had the quasi-obligatory hall commemorating Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, as well as a bandstand, fountains, and a pond created expressly for the Victoria amazonica. Annual flower shows encouraged local interest in horticulture.4 Perhaps the most spectacular public garden, however, is Krishnaraja Sagara (Brindavan Gardens), named for the Maharaja of Mysore and part of an ambitious irrigation scheme. It was the brainchild of the engineer Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, who built the dam in 1924, and Sir Mirza Ismail, who subsequently laid out the hillside garden with its blend of Mughal and English plantings and its colorful fountains (see Pl. 26).5
After independence many of these public parks, along with the botanical gardens (which doubled uneasily as parks), fell on hard times for lack of funds. Visiting Jaipur where he had once been prime minister, Sir Mirza found it “heartrending to see what should have been one of the most beautiful parks in India sadly neglected, and fast becoming a wilderness once more.” Earlier he had had to defend himself against charges of extravagance for his support of the Brindavan Gardens and beautification projects elsewhere. Invoking the clean, well-kept roads, the tidy gardens and trimmed hedges of England, the great open spaces in crowded London, he exhorted: “How many cities in India can boast of such parks?” And yet public parks and private gardens are both vital to “a full and happy life,” and thus “slum clearance and housing of the poor must go on pari passu with the beautification schemes; they are inseparable.” And, he insisted, amenities can pay for themselves, citing the Brindavan Hotel and Gardens as a prime example. Ironically, the Brindavan Gardens themselves subsequently went through a long period of poor maintenance, with weeds invading the flowerbeds and its illumination and fountains in a “pathetic state” until the provincial government belatedly commissioned a facelift in 2004.6
Sir Mirza’s views were very much those of a cosmopolitan Indian and were not shared by all. In a heated exchange in Chennai as late as 2000, a city planner charged that proposals for public spaces by a civic group were not “in synch with local attitudes,” maintaining, “We don’t go to parks like foreigners, we don’t have Saturdays and Sundays free, as they do. We don’t take walks for recreation, it’s not part of our concept of health. For leisure, we spend time with our families.” In rebuttal, others argued that if Indians did not use parks, it was because they were in such miserable condition, not because they were “foreign” things.7 In fact, one of the most profound legacies of the Raj may be the gradual reorientation of urban Indian family life from courtyard to park, from private to public space, in tandem with the democratization and redefinition of notions of leisure. Any nice Sunday finds flocks of Indians, in families, in couples, in random groupings, strolling and picnicking on the lakeside terraces of Mughal gardens in Kashmir, the neat lawns of the Victoria Memorial, the ample greenswards of the Raj Path, and the Disneyfied Lal Bagh of Bangalore (Figs. 54, 55; see Pls. 9, 27).
Thanks in large part to Curzon and his heirs, India’s monuments themselves are as much public parks as historical sites. They draw millions of domestic as well as foreign tourists. Their preservation is often a subject of political wrangling, pitting different ideologies and constituencies against each other. The Taj Mahal is only the most conspicuous—and most contentious—example. Since the early 1980s it has been in the eye of a succession of storms that have not yet abated. For almost a century the placid stretches of lawn and orderly rows of cypress remained pretty much as Curzon had ordained, but Agra has grown into a grimy, congested industrial city of 1.3 million, with pollution levels so high that WHO has identified it as a “pollution intensive zone.” In 1982 UNESCO designated both the Taj and the Agra Fort as World Heritage Sites, mandating that the government repair existing damage and protect them from future threats. By a neat sleight of hand, the state authorities outsourced the problem to the giant Tata Group, which agreed to keep the monuments in repair in return for permission to develop the two-kilometer strip between them as a “heritage corridor” with restaurants, shopping malls, cyber cafes—all the trappings of a modern tourist Mecca. And no touts, beggars, or snake charmers.
Fig. 54. Victoria Memorial Hall gardens, Kolkata
[Photograph by author]
Fig. 55. Sunday on the Rajpath
[Photograph by author]
Simultaneously, faculty and students in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois came up with a no less mindboggling plan for a Taj Mahal Cultural Heritage District: a proposal to link the Taj and Agra Fort with other cultural sites such as the Mahtab Bagh (Moonlight Garden) and the tomb of I’timad-ud-Daulah in an expanse of “green parks, orchards and gardens.” As tourists moved along the corridor, they would experience constantly unfolding visions, highlighting the “mystery and grandeur of Taj against a changing sky, floating above the waters, and silhouetted against the fields.” At its most ambitious, the plan imagined an earth-mound amphitheater with breathtaking views of the Taj as backdrop and a cleaned-up river on which tourists could glide by boat from site to site, like Mughal grandees of old.
Just as Lord Curzon aimed to control the visitor’s experience of Mughal masterpieces by imposing his own very English green-park vision, the University of Illinois planners seem to have been equally obsessed with the viewer’s “dynamic experience in time.” Whatever the nods to mango orchards and peasant farmers, their own “green aesthetic” reflected a late twentieth-century ecosensibility that has been attacked as no less culture-bound than Curzon’s, an Orientalist fantasy based on superficial site visits. Why not just dig up the manicured lawns and bougainvillea planted by the “misguided and ill-informed” British, argued a Delhi architect, and replace them with something more like the original shrubs, trees, and flowers? For now, however, all that remains of the showpiece riverfront promenade is the remnant of wall built before a decision by India’s Supreme Court halted both plans in 2003; below it lie eighty acres of derelict wasteland. What tourists viewing the Taj Mahal from Agra Fort see is “heaps of stinking garbage, carcasses, graves of children dotting the structure and mounds of rubble that invite mosquitoes, dogs, snakes, crows and vultures.”8
But this is hardly the end of the Taj saga. The latest scheme calls for two ropeways with gondolas, the first stretching from the Taj across to the Mahtab Bagh, the second from Agra Fort to the Mahtab Bagh to link the Taj to neighboring historic buildings. Ever eager to increase the number of tourists even beyond the 2.5 million who visited in 2008, local officials want to cap the “visitor experience” with a view from a giant Ferris wheel modeled on the London Eye. “Tourism is not everything,” protests o. P. Jain, an adviser to the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage. “The people who come to see the Taj are not the kind of people who like to go by ropeway or see it in front of a Ferris wheel.”9 It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court and the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) will agree. Meanwhile, shrinking greenbelts, massive highway projects, and a falling water table continue to plague the Taj and other Agra monuments. As dust levels rise they cause microscratches in the marble surfaces; these retain moisture and attract pollutants. In effect dust-laden winds from nearby construction sites and the more distant Rajasthan desert are sandblasting the Taj and threatening to turn its pure white marble an unappealing yellow.10
Debates surrounding the Taj Mahal have exposed broader conflicts over the meaning of public as well as of “heritage,” since they have often arisen over preservation issues, such as the maintenance of temples and monuments, as well as issues of mourning and remembrance. When the Raj Ghat was laid out in New Delhi as a memorial to the recently assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, it no doubt seemed natural to situate the black flower-topped marble platform marking the spot where he was cremated in 1948 within a larger park (see Pl. 28). In time memorials to other national leaders were added, including Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi, and her two sons, along with other prime ministers and presidents of the Republic. They are surrounded by beautiful lawns and plantings and a forest of peace, all designed by Sydney Percy-Lancaster, an Englishman who was born in India and spent his life there as an eminent horticulturalist.11
Later memorial parks have become more entangled in India’s turbulent politics, religious and secular. Such, for example, is the MGR Memorial Arch overlooking the Chennai marina. One enters through a great curved double arch leading into a small manicured lawn and beyond that a grassy maidan over which presides the sculpted bust of the prominent film star turned politician M. G. Ramachandran, known simply as MGR, who served as chief minister of Tamil Nadu from 1977 until his death ten years later. The memorial is awash with political and religious symbolism, all the more complicated because MGR’s body is actually buried on the site rather than simply his ashes—his religious views were always ambiguous. Beyond the sacred flame, the open lotus and other icons of traditional religious and political identity, however, it is striking that the setting is a westernized one of landscaped grounds with walkways and serpentine paths meant for strolling and relaxation as well as veneration.12
Lucknow, on the other hand, weathered the tumultuous years following independence surprisingly unruffled. As it grew into a sprawling, polluted city of over two million, it lost any claim to being a garden city, but tourists have continued to flock to see the crumbling ruins of nawabi imambaras and palaces and, most of all, the pockmarked ruins of the Residency. On August 15, 1947, the day India declared independence from Great Britain, nationalists pulled down the banner that had flown night and day since 1857, but otherwise no one seemed to have a problem with maintaining the Residency and its memorial gardens as a “heritage site” until 2007, the 150th anniversary of the Uprising. On that occasion a furor erupted when a small group of British tourists and scholars, by no means uncritical apologists of empire, came to the city to commemorate the events of 1857. For once Muslims and Hindus were united in their outrage, with more extreme voices calling for Tennyson to be banned entirely from school textbooks in retaliation for his poem extolling the bravery of the defenders of Lucknow.13 In Cawnpore the gardens are no longer a memorial to the British massacred at the Bibighar: rechristened Nana Rao Park, they now honor the memory of the leaders of the uprising and specifically the man blamed for the massacre of women and children at Satichaura Ghat and then at the Bibighar. Marochetti’s Angel of the Resurrection and its surrounding screen have been moved to All Souls’ Memorial Church for safekeeping. The infamous well has been cemented over.14
New Delhi and its gardens have had a mixed legacy. In the turmoil follow ing partition in 1947 the Purana Qila and Humayun’s Tomb became huge refugee camps for those fleeing sectarian violence. The camps remained open for some five years during which the gardens suffered extensive damage. Thanks to the Aga Khan Trust, the ASI has been able to embark on an extensive program of restoration not only of its structures, but also of the grounds with their water channels, fountains, and the inevitable lawns, so that the complex is now in far better condition than many of the city’s other monuments.15
With independence the Viceroy’s House was rechristened Rashtrapati Bhavan. The first Indian heads of state were men in the Gandhian mold and found themselves out of place in the vastness of its imperial spaces. President Rajaji lamented, “I am in a zoo and a circus.” He found solace in the garden and its flowers: “I never before possessed this wealth . . . but now that I had it for a time I feel sad when I see the little things fade and wither before their harsh father the sun.” Dr. Zakir Husain, too, found the garden the only reward for living in what he termed “the belly of this leviathan.”16 And yet the very existence of these gardens contradicted nature, since in the harsh climate of Delhi they lay dried up and lifeless for much of the year.
If palace and garden have largely defied time, Delhi itself has been changing. Most of the city walls were finally pulled down in the decade after independence. The sixty-foot statue of the King-Emperor that crowned the majestic Raj Path (formerly Kingsway) lies forgotten in Coronation Park, once the scene of three imperial durbars, now “an Arthurian wasteland of swamp, mud and camel-thorn.”17 Nevertheless, the lawns along the Rajpath still fill with festive crowds following Republic Day celebrations (held on January 26). But Lutyens’s city is showing signs of decay. The legions of trees planted by William Mustoe and Walter George throughout the city have reached the end of their normal life spans; at the same time, volunteer but unwanted peepal trees are carving toeholds in the masonry of the Secretariats.18 And where as late as the early 1980s there was not a skyscraper in sight, now the city is expanding wildly outward and upward. A gleaming high-rise in glass and steel now looms up behind the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The “green lungs” of central Delhi make it the only city center in the world that is several degrees cooler than its periphery, but these will inevitably give way, William Dalrymple warns, to “a miasma of new concrete.” Just as the Indian National Trust is proposing to have Lutyens’s Delhi designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, rampant development is destroying both the bungalows of the new city and the havelis of the old.19 Mahatma Gandhi Marg, the noisiest and most polluted stretch of the Ring Road, cuts the Red Fort off from the riverbank. In less than a century, the population of the city has increased from about a quarter of a million to more than14 million, choking much of the time on dirty air in spite of widespread conversion of buses to CNG (compressed natural gas) and the construction of a widely heralded metro system. Early in the new millennium WHO listed Delhi as the seventh most polluted city in the world; other estimates rank it even worse.20
The feverish preparations leading up the Commonwealth Games held in October 2010 conjured up images of Imperial Durbars--indeed some may well have longed for the autocratic hand of a Curzon to bring order to the chaos. The entire city was turned into a construction site; heavy equipment vied with hand labor, bulldozers with women in saris carrying loads on their heads; piles of old debris and new bricks were everywhere. In its plans to ensure a “greener look” for the city, the government out-Mustoed Mustoe: The horticultural department arranged to have some 500,000 plants, from a pool of 41,000 species, ready to bloom during the period of the games. Major thoroughfares were spruced up with luxuriant medians bedecked with flowers. In all, the master plan covered 84 main roads, 19 flyovers and bridges, and 198 traffic circles, all embellished with a variety of plants, shrubs, and grasses drawn from the Roshanara Bagh nurseries: plumerias, bougainvilleas, lantanas, cassias, neems, ashokas, hibiscus and many more. When the mayor of Delhi herself went to Bangalore, she was so taken with the Laxmi taru or paradise tree (Simarouba glauca) that she ordered four thousand of them to be brought from their native South America, pointing out that they also produce an edible oil. While existing parks were given a facelift, the focus was on beautifying the various sports venues with sixty lakhs of potted plants, or 6 million plants. And at the center of it all: Nehru Stadium, a latter-day Rashtrapati Bhavan.21
The professed aim was to make Delhi a world-class city, but it also had aspects of a Potemkin village. The municipal government launched a scheme to screen out slums and garbage along the roads to the games with fast growing bamboo trees. More drastically, large tracts of slums along the banks of the Yamuna River were demolished wholesale, their residents resettled twenty-five miles from the city center, if at all. At the same time environmentalists protested the felling of large tracts of trees in the Siri Forest to make way for construction of sports facilities.22
And what of the Ridge, so lovingly afforested by William Robertson Mustoe? Like Firoz Shah’s before him, Mustoe’s labors have largely counted for naught. The Ridge lost its government protection, and what was intended as Delhi’s other “vital green lung” has been ruthlessly opened up to speculation and development: a stadium-cum-theater larger than the Roman Colosseum and rarely used, a wireless station, and a network of roads. Two new parks were created without regard for the ecological consequences, uprooting much of Mustoe’s carefully nurtured vegetation. Patwant Singh noted: “This self-sustaining ecosystem—a proud friend and benefactor—has been grievously wounded by those it reached out to help. The sight of the Ridge bleeding to death is not only an agonizing reminder of the happy days we spent there, but also of the predatory ways of man.” Singh’s lament for the Ridge could stand as a lament for much that has been lost in the unchecked development of Delhi in the last decades. Whether a recent Supreme Court injunction against further building on the Ridge will succeed remains to be seen.23
The garden legacies of other towns and cities have also faced problems as they have navigated the transition from colonial rule to independence. The shabby, weed-infested Pankot in Paul Scott’s Staying On catches the down-at-the-heels emptiness of the immediate post-independence period in Simla (now Shimla) and other hill stations. As the remnant of retired colonial personnel died or went back to England, however, these quintessential outposts of Englishness began to take on a new life as holiday destinations for the burgeoning Indian middle class. Now the roads are clogged with Indians escaping from the heat of the “burning plains.” No longer the summer capital of the Raj, Shimla has become the year-round capital of the state of Himachal Pradesh, adding to the overbuilding and congestion that were already a problem a century ago. The Viceregal Lodge currently houses the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in its still-stately grounds with their breathtaking views, and malis still start tender flowers in its greenhouses.
The brutal history of Kashmir both before and after Indian independence has made a mockery of both Mughal and British paeans to this paradise on earth—a paradise for some, to be sure, but a purgatory for others. Conquered by Akbar, then by Afghans and Sikhs, the land of Lalla Rookh passed into British hands as part of the spoils of the First Sikh War in 1846. The British promptly sold it to the Dogra Maharaja Gulab Singh for 75 lakhs of rupees (£750,000) as a reward for turning against his former overlord. A century later many expected it to join Pakistan because of its predominantly Muslim population. This did not happen, nor did a mandated United Nations plebiscite ever take place. Instead Kashmir has been the scene of almost constant conflict and violent repression in the sixty-plus years since. Basharat Peer describes the capital, Srinagar, as a “city of bunkers”—no city in the world, he claims, has a greater military presence.24
The princely gardens dotting the hillside shores of Dal Lake have not escaped the turmoil. The Pari Mahal, Dara Shikoh’s “Fairies’ Palace,” was for a time “the world’s most beautiful paramilitary camp.” Two of the domed chambers in its rough stone walls were converted into barracks; on a higher terrace stood sentries with automatic rifles in a sandbagged watchtower. In a desperate effort to attract foreign tourists, scared off by continued unrest, the government has restored many of Kashmir’s gardens, including the Pari Mahal. But if the barracks are gone, the military are still ubiquitous, and the sight of armed soldiers strikes an incongruous note amid the natural and man-made beauty of the surroundings. The gardens retain their original Mughal plan, adapted to set off the spectacular setting: low-walled enclosures (no need to worry here about voyeurs on elephants peering down into zenana gardens) with a series of terraces rising from the shore, water-chutes dotted with fountains running down the center, and pavilions straddling the water at each level (see Pl. 9). While lovely old chenars (Oriental plane trees) remain in some of the gardens, one misses the Mughal favorites, the almonds and apricots and quinces that would have delighted eye, nose, and palate. Many of the flowers would still be familiar, but not so the very English arrangements of beds—a far cry from the scatter of spring flowers among fruit trees and cypresses—and the low hedges and topiary; unbroken stretches of lawn have replaced the geometric quadrants of earlier times.25
Like the Delhi Ridge, all of the hill stations suffer from the deforestation that began during the Raj and has if anything accelerated since. In Kashmir timber smuggling is a major problem, making its magnificent deodars increasingly rare (and therefore increasingly valuable). No longer can one find wild orchids in the Nilgiri hills; tea and market gardens have replaced meadows and sholas. Even the giant silvery eucalyptus and blue-green wattles, both imported from Australia and planted once upon a time by men of the old Madras Army, have been chopped down in what Ooty’s memorialist likens to the final act of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, although there have been subsequent attempts at reforestation. Ooty’s lake has been shrinking; always a sewer, it is now an even smaller sewer. Luxury hotels dot the hillsides, shopping malls and arcades the town center.26
In Madras Lord Clive’s sumptuous Government House and its Kewinspired gardens were rescued once from neglect by Charles Trevelyan in the mid-nineteenth century, but there was no one to save it from the haphazard growth that enveloped it a hundred years later. When Trevelyan’s descendant visited it in 1983, the “wilderness” had disappeared, replaced by “typically municipal flowerbeds of love-lies-bleeding and marigolds.” Nothing was left of the deer park, and skyscrapers blocked the views of the river.27 Thomas Munro’s beloved Guindy Lodge survives in much better shape as the official residence of the governor of Tamil Nadu, thanks to its distance from the city center and location within a national park, unkempt though it may be (see Fig. 8). Barrackpore has not been so lucky. The gardens have been completely swallowed up—the irony is all too obvious—by barracks, military academies, and firing ranges. When I visited in 2008, it took the determination of a very persistent guide and driver to ferret out the grave of Lady Canning: a small patch of green above a firing range for women soldiers on the river’s edge, with cows browsing all about. An equestrian statue of Lord Canning completes the scene, although he is buried far away in England (see Pl. 29).
In spite of the Communist dominance of Bengal politics, Calcutta seems surprisingly comfortable with its imperial past. British Calcutta’s favorite watering place, the Tollygunge Club, thrives under new management, now catering to Indian elites (see Pl. 30). The statues of Lord Curzon (fore) and Queen Victoria (aft) welcome strollers to the neatly manicured lawns and colorful flowerbeds of the Victoria Memorial Hall. On a Sunday afternoon one may catch a concert by a bagpipe band, its bandsmen bright in their woolen tartans. Even the gardens of Tagore’s youth have been tamed and Jorasanko converted into a family museum and art school.28
There are, however, other legacies that are more subtle. In Ooty the Botanical Garden provides an oasis, with its verdant slopes, exotic trees, and floral map of India. Above it, near the greenhouses, is another Rashtrapati Bhavan, once the summer residence of the governor of Madras, now the retreat of the governor of Tamil Nadu. When I visited in 2003, the gardens at Government House were undergoing a welcome restoration. Incidentally, the Ooty Hunt Club, the only hunt club left east of Suez, still rides to hounds, its committee members resplendent in the knee-length scarlet coats with green collar designed in 1907 by a British army officer. The club’s membership is 95 percent Indian, the quarry is the jackal rather than the fox, and it is billed as probably the world’s fastest hunt.29 The neighboring station of Coonor may not have a hunt club, but amid the tourist development Lady Canning’s Seat remains a popular destination for walkers—the outcropping she so loved for its richness of vegetation, its panorama of hills and distant plain. These days the hills are covered with tea plantations, and Lady Canning herself may be as little known to Coonor’s visitors as she is to Calcutta’s. Meanwhile, the ghosts of many an English gardener still haunt the Indian countryside, like the old English lady who used to live in a cottage in Ooty and is still seen occasionally, “an unalarming phantom pottering approvingly among the flowers.” 30
Paradoxically, Bangalore has moved from garrison town to high-tech capital of India without losing its preeminence in the garden world. The Lal Bagh is still the leading botanical garden in the Deccan, proudly boasting of its founding by Tipu Sultan; plant-lovers from all over India still flock to its biannual flower shows and order stock from its nurseries. Visitors entering the main gate are greeted by a flower clock and a bevy of garden gnomes (see Pl. 27). In England, the presence of garden gnomes was taken as an almost sure sign of Tory sympathies, but it is not clear what they signify here.31 Although most of Bangalore’s idiosyncratic bargeboard bungalows have fallen into disrepair or been replaced with apartment blocks, some Indian gardeners, such as Mrs. Subbanna, have stoutly carried on the city’s horticultural traditions. Her award-winning garden at Lalitadiri is a riot of flowers set in a neatly trimmed lawn; minute silvery cascades ripple down from a miniature waterfall and red lotus dot the serene lotus pond. Ferns and orchids trail from pots hanging on the verandah and she has made a rose garden behind the house.32
The “heritage gardens” of top-range hotels have capitalized on Raj nostalgia. No Indian hotel with any pretensions is without its lawns and neat flowerbeds, preferably stocked with English flowers. The Imperial Hotel in the heart of New Delhi boasts of its three acres of “lush greens” (read: struggling doob grass), Royal palms, ferns, flowers, shrubs, and legions of potted plants (see Pl. 31). The Taj West End in Bangalore goes this one better by advertising twenty acres of landscaped gardens. In Shimla the more modest garden terrace of the old-fashioned Clarke’s Hotel at the eastern end of the Mall clings to the precipitous hillside. One of the most appealing of the Raj-era gardens, however, is that of the cozy Savoy Hotel in Ooty, with its inviting lawns, cheerful flowers, and trellised doorways—to be sure, showcase lawns and familiar flowers are a good deal easier to lay on in the hills than on the plains. In Rajasthan hotel gardens are more apt to invoke Mughal models; witness the Lake Palace in Udaipur and the Rambagh in Jaipur, both converted palaces.
The English garden aesthetic has also been perpetuated in such Raj imports as courts of law and the campuses of colleges and universities, with their eclectic but essentially British architecture and landscaping. As the novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra describes Varanasi University: “Set in the middle of large lawns and gardens, the buildings look like products of an extravagant imagination . . . all jumbled together in stone.” If anything, the old campus of Mumbai University is the product of an even more extravagant imagination (see Pl. 32). The modern information technology campuses spreading across the country are heir to these universities, boasting manicured lawns and plantings, to say nothing of putting greens and recreational facilities that universities could never dream of. The website for India’s National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) proclaims that one of its great joys is its gardens and that “a picturesque garden supplements an ideal workplace.” On the main campus there is a rose garden in front of the administrative block, “wellmowed . . . lawns and the dense collection of big trees opposite the systems block.” A subsidiary campus is wilder, with a park built around a historical temple. Every year, the site declares, the NAL gardens receive a host of prizes from the Bangalore Urban Art Commission.33
Just as they once were indispensable attributes of palaces, gardens have become badges of corporate modernity in contemporary India. Borrowing from the almost formulaic models of ASI-landscaped monuments, they feature verdant expanses of green, graveled or cemented paths lined with flower-beds or low hedges, and occasional trees and flowering shrubs. By extension the same is true of new megatemples, such Delhi’s Akshardham Temple on the south bank of the Yamuna River adjacent to the Commonwealth Games athletes’ village. Completed in 2005 with major corporate support as well as the volunteer efforts of thousands, it is dedicated to the memory of Bhagwan Swaminarayan, whose life and teachings are celebrated in a state-of-the-art two-hour multimedia presentation, along with a resolutely nationalist overview of Indian history. While the complex invokes traditional Hindu motifs with an infinitude of carved reliefs and colonnades, it bears little resemblance to classical Indian temples such as the great Meenakshi Temple in Madurai. Where Meenakshi encloses a modest garden framing a pool around which extends a labyrinth of shrines to individual deities, the Akshardham mandir (temple) sits in the midst of a vast hundred-acre site with the by now clichéd “beautifully manicured lawns.” In the midst of these are gardens, fountains, a colossal eight-petaled “lotus-shaped creation,” and sixty-five bronze statues of India’s great men, women, and children: “child gems, valorous warriors, national figures and great women personalities.” Indeed, Akshardham is as eclectic in its spirituality as in its landscaping.34
Gardens as Private Spaces
Gardens are not always motivated by politics or appeals to heritage. They may not even be politically correct. Take, for example, the case of Jawaharlal Nehru, the man with the signature red rose in his lapel. Nehru spent much of the 1930s in various prisons as a result of his agitation against British rule in India. During a term in Almora jail in 1934–35 he developed an interest in the natural world. “Latterly,” he wrote, “I have felt drawn more and more towards nature—to plants and animals. Maybe it is a relief and an escape from human folly, human cowardice and human knavery.” The possibilities for gardening were limited in the dusty plains of the United Provinces where he first found himself, but when he was later jailed at Dehra Dun, in the foothills of the Himalayas, he again turned to gardening. With official permission, he transformed a portion of the prison yard into a flower garden and was able to grow from seed a variety of classic English flowers: sweet peas, hollyhocks, nasturtiums, candy-tuft, lupines, stocks, and dianthus. Fellow prisoners helped him in his labors—he was amused by their mangling of English names: hollyhock, for example, came out as “Ali Haq.” He loved gardening, he confessed, not just for the beauty of the flowers but for the contact with the “soft warm earth.” only three years after his last imprisonment, he found himself living in Teen Murti House, built two decades earlier as the residence of the British commander-in-chief in Lutyens’s New Delhi. It was all rather too imperial for his tastes even as prime minister of the now-independent India, but the cabinet insisted that he have an appropriate residence. His consolation was an unimpeded view of its lovely lawns and gardens from his study window.35
Nehru’s love of English flowers and gardens has been shared by many of his fellow citizens; how many it is impossible to say. In Coorg in the 1970s, the travel writer Dervla Murphy found an Indian coffee planter’s wife who, starting from bare ground, created “what can only be described as a mini-Kew.”36 Another devotee is C. P. Sujaya, a retired civil servant who divides her time between Delhi and Shimla. Sujaya fell in love with English gardens and English flowers as a child. She explains that Agatha Christie was one of her great inspirations, for “her books may be about murders but she had a fondness for writing about flowers, especially sweet peas, the vicar’s wife always won first prize.” Indeed, she recounts, an “addiction to English novels as a young child (as a part of the colonization process!) growing up in Kerala had sowed the seeds of pansies and sweet peas . . . snapdragon and larkspur, stock and carnations, daffodils, etc., in my mind long, long before I had a glimpse of them when I went up North after my marriage.” None of them grew in the south, so that when she actually saw these flowers for the first time she was “absolutely bowled over.”
When Sujaya retired in 2003 there was at last the leisure to create a garden in the small plot surrounding her new house in Shimla, but it has not been smooth sailing, with much trial and error. Azaleas, “always reminiscent of Daphne Du Maurier and Rebecca,” have proven recalcitrant, but she hopes to see them flower some day. She has a great many pots and hanging baskets, filled especially with giant pansies and freesias, although they require a lot of attention. Primroses flourish in the spring, just when she is in Delhi to escape the cold of Shimla, but in September one has the rare treat of pansies blooming. The gardener’s life is much easier in the south, where luxuriant perennials just keep growing; as she notes ruefully, “it is certainly much more burdensome to have a garden in a temperate clime—you have to plan much more.” She has tried importing crotons all the way from Bangalore, hoping they would thrive in the atrium of their home, with its protective roof of transparent polycarbonate. Alas, they didn’t survive the winter, but the primroses and chrysanthemums put on a good show. For sweet peas, she relies on seeds from her daughter in the United States and some from the United Kingdom.
Finding a reliable mali has been a nightmare. She has discovered that Indian malis suffer from a lack of self-esteem, feeling that working outside is much inferior to working inside—that, equal though the skills demanded may be, it is a far, far better thing to work in the kitchen than in the garden. The same young man who serves her guests with panache when they drop by in the evening is miserable when working in the garden, hating every minute of it. “So in spite of the Brits leaving us this special legacy of ‘English’ flowers,” she comments ruefully, “they haven’t empowered the malis.”37
Perhaps we should leave the final word about the legacy of English gardens to a character in Indian literature, Mrs. Mahesh Kapoor in Vikram Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy (1993). Decent, kind, affectionate Mrs. Mahesh Kapoor, bullied by her husband, without even a name of her own. But in her garden she is the gentle monarch, a Queen Victoria in her floral realm, although she may have some small differences with her mali over level versus uneven expanses of grass. The sweet English flowers she grows in the beds at Prem Nivas flank green springy lawns, the envy of her rivals, whom she routinely bests at flower shows. They coexist with the native flowering trees that add their own brilliance and perfumes to the air. Impatient with her during her lifetime, Mahesh Kapoor finds the garden his only refuge after her death: “a nameless, wordless one, with birdsong its only sound—and it was dominated, when he closed his eyes, by the least intellectualizable sense—that of scent.”38