Delhiwale: The Main Bazar door

A historic stone doorway in Paharganj contrasts with modern life, echoing memories of a former school, yet remains a fragile architectural gem.

Long, slender and tapering, the stone doorway is crowned by a smooth arch. That arch is crowned by another wider arch. The entire thing is topped by a bouquet of sculpted flowers.

Just beside the doorway stands the 50-year-old showroom Ram Babu & Brothers, which specialises in “all school uniforms.” (HT Photo)

The darwaza looks deserted, but is dense with many other embellishments. Niched taaks, floral motifs, petite columns… only an extensive architectural treatise can illustrate its multitudinous aspects.

Such doorways are commonly identified with historic Old Delhi. But this is backpackers’ Paharganj, near the New Delhi railway station, and the doorway mutely faces modern life that continually unfolds in the disorderly Main Bazar from dawn to midnight. The darwaza’s archaic style sets it apart from the market’s contemporary aesthetics, a brick-and-glass coupling that adorns towns and cities across India.

The darwaza is always closed. During the day, a pavement hawker, known to all as Pandit ji, sits outside the doorway. He has been administering his establishment for years. This afternoon, he has gone for lunch, and Murari, a neighbouring hawker, is keeping an eye on the stall. This gentleman’s guess is that the darwaza must have belonged to a wealthy seth’s haveli.

Whatever, the darwaza’s dense details are etched out as delicately as an ambitious piece of sculpture. This moment at least, the invasive coarseness of the contemporary Main Bazar architecture is heightening its fragility. But the doorway is here to stay. The building of which it is a part still stands. The beautiful balcony is clearly visible from the street. It has doorways of its own. A window under the balcony has wooden panes covered in dust.

A middle-aged Paharganj bookseller, who grew up in the neighbourhood, vividly remembers the building’s previous life as a government-run primary school. Kids would restlessly crowd the doorway in the morning, he recalls, and the hum of the classroom chatter would emanate out from the balcony during the afternoon, slowly spreading over the Main Bazar chaos.

Just beside the doorway stands the 50-year-old showroom Ram Babu & Brothers, which specialises in “all school uniforms.” Owner Anil Aggarwal says that the school shut down two decades ago “because it was felt that the old building was no longer strong enough to ably bear the weight of so many people”.

On craning one’s neck upwards, and spotting green grass growing on one side of the balcony’s roof, the darwaza suddenly begins to look even more neglected.