Last week HT carried a sketch of the Qutub Minar as it would appear if the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) pushed its plan for the expansion of the mass transit system into the Mehrauli zone. It showed an elevated corridor of concrete, cutting across the belly of the historic monument. The visual was a reality check for Dilliwallahs and indeed for those who cherish Delhi’s unique history and character. The way it had been conceived, the expansion of the Metro towards south Delhi seemed poised to destroy large parts of Delhi’s historic character.
Fortunately, permission to construct this corridor has not received clearance from the Archaelological Survey of India. But that this was planned in the first place was in itself an unpleasant surprise. In north Delhi, the same DMRC had treated another heritage zone in a much more sensitive manner. Across the stretch from Connaught Place to the Delhi University Ridge, it sensibly tunneled its way underground so that the historic monuments in the vicinity remained substantially unaffected by the Metro rail. Why the DMRC considered creating concrete causeways across an equally rich and older landscape in South Delhi is thus unfathomable in terms of its own work. The bottomline, it seems, is the additional sum of Rs 450 crore (1 per cent of the total estimated cost of Rs 44,000 crore for the transit system). Either the government is unwilling to mobilise its resources or the DMRC is unable to find alternative ways of raising this money.
The magnificent Mehrauli zone and its ruin-strewn surroundings are a familiar sight for all visitors and citizens. Its protected structures lie at the heart of the controversy about the extension of the rail system. What is not understood by most however is that what warrants preservation here is not just the features of renown, such as the Qutub Minar or the numerous tombs and mosques under ASI protection, but — as B.M. Pande, a retired ASI director points out so well — the already endangered Aravalli landscape across which these are scattered. This is already under threat and would have been rendered even more fragile and precarious with an elevated rail system.
{{/usCountry}}The magnificent Mehrauli zone and its ruin-strewn surroundings are a familiar sight for all visitors and citizens. Its protected structures lie at the heart of the controversy about the extension of the rail system. What is not understood by most however is that what warrants preservation here is not just the features of renown, such as the Qutub Minar or the numerous tombs and mosques under ASI protection, but — as B.M. Pande, a retired ASI director points out so well — the already endangered Aravalli landscape across which these are scattered. This is already under threat and would have been rendered even more fragile and precarious with an elevated rail system.
{{/usCountry}}What is this landscape which lies at the heart of the expansion plan? What aspects should the DMRC take into consideration as it further extends Metro lines into Haryana? And why is it urgent that this landscape is not treated as a luxury expendable in the name of development?
The Delhi-Haryana axis of the rocky Aravallis is an area in which ancient relics of all kinds are scattered. The pahadi, as it is locally called, constitutes the northernmost outlier of one of the oldest mountain ranges of India. The hills are comparatively low and of modest proportions because of their eroded character. At the same time, their reddish rocks and vegetation impart a specific identity to this entire area. Anyone who has gone across to see the Lal Kot ramparts and walls would know that large parts of that medieval fortified complex lie in a scrub forest of kikar and babul, flourishing across unconsolidated Aravalli ravines and outcrops.
This is a landscape that encloses enormously rich and remarkable histories of all kinds. Histories that look back over longer stretches of time than the centuries marked by the Gupta king, who set up an iron pillar in what was later converted into the courtyard of a medieval mosque by the Delhi sultans who created the Qutub complex. Virtually right across this entire terrain are scattered numerous Stone Age sites that go back to perhaps a hundred thousand years ago. There are no structures or walls that mark the presence of pre-historic humans here — just scatters of stone debitage where people fashioned stone tools. About fifty of these are documented and published.
Some of these lie in university campuses — near the main gate of DU’s North Campus, some exposed around the South Campus on the Dhaula Kuan ridge and across JNU’s hills. Some also lie in and around the Qutub zone: Ladho Sarai and Chhattarpur are two sites where upper palaeolithic material and microliths are known to occur. And this extends beyond the Qutub as well, across the Gurgaon bypass and Manesar as also in the Badkhal-Sohna stretch.
Many of these places which yielded prehistoric tools in the Eighties have been transformed, on one hand by the unstoppable pace of destruction unleashed by stone and sand mining, and on the other by illegal and legal constructions. Those that are least altered, however, are sites which form part of institutional areas where large segments of the Aravalli landscape still lie intact.
The 1,500 acres lung formed by the JNU Campus is an example worth remembering. From its environs have been recovered, palaeoliths used by early hunter-gatherers, and small microlithic scatters left by later groups, as also old ceramics. These have been carefully unearthed by Mudit Trivedi, a student of that university. His own drive and enthusiasm have been important in this. But as he says, the extensive prehistoric land use of this section of the Aravallis, that he successfully studied, was because “the university construction is restricted to certain areas of the campus alone”. To put it another way, the past has survived because the landscape in which it is embedded has survived well.
For these reasons, in many parts of the world, what warrants preservation has expanded with what is thought historically significant. In fact, landscapes with historic associations are now treated on par with precious monuments and relics. Egdon Heath in Dorset (England) and its immortal associations with Thomas Hardy, when threatened by nuclear power, was described as being as irreplaceable as a Gothic cathedral. It would do well to remember that, that was a landscape which was sought to be preserved not because of the material richness of its past but because it formed an integral part of the work of one of the greatest novelists of England.
Why are we then not treating the Delhi Aravallis and the past embedded in it as an asset worth preserving?
Much that is ancient has been destroyed by modern developers in just the last two decades on the southern Aravalli ridge. Let us not deliberately destroy that dwindling heritage any further. The PIL petitions which have led to court-directed demolitions of farmhouses in the Gurgaon-Sohna stretch are a step in that direction.
Another step in that direction would be the mandatory requirement of an archaeologically sensitive environment statement, rather than one focussed only on monuments, to be placed in the public domain by all developers. There would then be awareness of what is at stake and additional resources are found for safeguarding such landscapes.
The writer teaches archaeology in Delhi University and has done extensive field work in the Delhi-Haryana Aravallis since 1985