Garden Variety

DELHI IS OFTEN remarked on for a having an unusual amount of green cover for such a large urban agglomeration. This is, however, a relatively new phenomenon. Delhi’s climate is not naturally conducive to lush vegetation. With a fairly low annual rainfall, which is moreover concentrated in the monsoon months, the natural vegetation of Delhi is described as ‘semi-desert’, with relatively few, rather thorny, medium sized trees.

This picture of a rather arid landscape is borne out by histori­cal visual depictions too. A 16th-century painting in the Akbarnama, the history of Akbar’s reign, shows the emperor hunting in Palam. In this illustration, the landscape is dry and rocky, with a little scrubby vegetation and some stunted trees. Later depictions, for instance the sketches made by European visitors in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and photo­graphs from the latter half of the 19th century, are not very different. They typically show vast, practically treeless, vistas.

These historical images of open areas are of course in sharp contrast to the places where people actually lived. The very fact that the natural vegetation was sparse and the climate hot and dry, prompted those who lived in the Delhi region to cultivate trees and other vegetation to provide relief from natural conditions. The very first humans who took up agriculture in this area were the inhabitants of Late Harappan villages such as Mandoli and Bhorgarh, inhabited around 2000–1000 B.C.E. They are likely to have planted trees for shade around their homes, carefully tending and watering them as they did their crops.

The Late Harappan sites have been revealed during archaeo­logical excavations. No such evidence is available for a site that is by tradition believed to have existed in the area roughly around the Purana Qila, i.e. Indraprastha. Though positive identification of the site has not been made, the Mahabharata tells us that the Pandavas constructed a city around here, and also gives us many details of what that city was like. Evidently it was surrounded by gardens, and the text gives us the names of several trees that were planted here: amarataka (hog plum), amalaka (amla), bakula (maulsari), atimuktak (gaub persimmon), and nagapushpa (cannonball tree) are among the species mentioned. Some, like the maulsari, amla and gaub persimmon, are still to be seen around Delhi, but a moisture-loving tree like the cannonball may seem an odd fit here.

We must of course allow for a certain amount of hyper­bole and literary embellishment. The text of the epic that is available to us today has been modified over the course of its history, and the kind of gardens it describes may well be based on a later idealisation.

For later periods of history we have more concrete evidence, both in texts and in archaeology, of the settlements that devel­oped in the area that we today call Delhi. The settlements includ­ed a series of capital cities—Lal Kot, Kilugarhi, Siri, Tughlaqabad Jahanpanah, Firozabad, Dinpanah, Sher Garh, Shahjahanabad, and finally New Delhi. There were also important settlements outside these capitals, such as the suburban settlements of Nizamuddin and Jaisingpura, or the village of Najafgarh. We can presume that as each of these settlements developed, their inhabitants planted gardens in and around them.

While the remains of buildings from many of these areas of human habitation do remain, the gardens have by and large disappeared. This is because unlike brick and stone structures which can survive for centuries despite neglect, cultivated flora, even trees, eventually die if not tended, and/or replaced when they come to the end of their life span. For references to these gar­dens we must again turn to texts for stray references. For instance, we are told that in the last decade of the 13th century the emperor Jalaluddin Khalji laid out a garden between the river Yamuna and his fortified palace of Kilugarhi (located around present day Kilokri village). Nothing remains of either Kilugarhi or the gar­den planted in it. In fact even the river has now changed course.

The oldest garden of which some remains can still be found in Delhi, dates from the 14th century, when Delhi was ruled by the Tughlaq dynasty. Though the original horticulture of the garden has disappeared without a trace, we are lucky to have some physical remains of a terraced garden—probably the only such Tughlaq-era garden in existence. It lies inside a modern DDA park called Vasant Udyan, in Vasant Vihar. We can see the remains of a raised stone water channel, stone masonry wells, and small tanks. These are all that remains of an irrigation system that would have irrigated the garden. There are some other structures on the different terraces which still exist—a small mosque, and a large tomb, known as Bara Lao ka Gumbad, which was added to the garden in the 15th century. This garden from the Tughlaq era was not built in or next to a royal palace or even close to the urban settlement of that time. It was at a considerable distance from the city, which would have been Firozabad, around present-day Firoz Shah Kotla. It was probably laid out by a royal or other wealthy patron as a retreat for rest and recreation, maybe a halting place on a highway.

We have many more gardens surviving from the Mughal period, which was in a way the high point in the laying out of formal gardens. The Mughals in fact often camped in tents in gardens on their travels through the length and breadth of their empire, and in their capital cities, surrounded their palaces with gardens too. Some of the most important gardens laid out in this period were settings for tombs—Humayun’s tomb, constructed in the mid-16th century, to Safdarjung’s tomb built nearly two centuries later, being the most prominent of these. Apart from the architectural remains that have survived, we also have a good idea of the kind of plants that grew in Mughal gardens: fruit trees such as mango, orange, lemon, and fig; orna­mentals such as harshringar and cypress (the latter considered a symbol of mortality, and therefore commonly used in garden tombs); and an array of flowering plants: roses, red or pink oleander, hibiscus, and jasmine among them.

Our sources for this are mentions in texts, and also Mughal miniature paintings which give us a good idea of what a Mughal garden would have looked like. They show us formal gardens with water channels, pools and fountains, and plots filled with trees laden with fruits and flowers. Pavilions inside the garden provided a place in which to relax and socialise.

The next phase in garden landscaping in Delhi was inaugu­rated in the second half of the 19th century, under British rule. The earliest interventions came in the form of a reworking of the Mughal gardens. In the immediate aftermath of the Revolt of 1857 and the extinguishing of the Mughal dynasty, all the royal properties including the gardens were confiscated, and for several decades were allowed to fall into a condition of abject neglect and even wilful destruction. For instance, many of the trees in the garden surrounding Humayun’s tomb were cut down, and the land let out for cultivation for some decades. Later in the century, some efforts began to be made to restore these gardens as places of recreation, but this was done using a markedly English aesthetic, where it was expanses of lawn rather than trees that came to dominate gardens.

The 20th century brought with it a significant round of garden-making, particularly when the British rulers of India shifted the capital of the country from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911. New Delhi, the new capital, was constructed on a plan that owed very little to the dense built-up areas typical of other British cities like Calcutta and Bombay. Instead, it incorporated more green cover generally, as well as specially landscaped parks and gardens. This pattern of city planning continued to be followed in the city after Independence, when many of the new housing colonies were built low rise, with trees in big and small parks as well as by roadsides. Significant gardens have continued to be laid out, right down to the early years of this century.

A long history of garden-making has given us a city that has a large number, and an interesting variety, of gardens. Some of them have a long history, some are quite new, for as the city has expanded, so have its gardens and green spaces.

LODI GARDEN

Minhaj e Siraj Juzjani, a chronicler writing in the early 13th century, wrote that the sultans of Delhi used to receive foreign emissaries in the ‘Bagh e Jadd’. This name, which means ‘garden of bounty’, has survived down to our time in the name ‘Jor Bagh’, borne by a colony in Central Delhi. What remains of the garden itself now goes by the name of Lodi Garden, which is next to Jor Bagh.

In Juzjani’s time this garden would have had the advantage of a stream flowing through it, providing much-needed irrigation. Whether or not it had any buildings at the time, we do not know. The buildings that we see in it today began to be added from the mid-15th century. The first of these was the tomb of Mohammad Shah, the third ruler of the short-lived Syed dynasty.

In the absence of any concrete record, we can but speculate on why this spot was chosen as a burial site when Mohammad Shah died in 1443-44. It was not far from the dargah of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, which gave the site sanctity. The garden setting, with the stream flowing nearby, was also particularly appropriate for a tomb. Since in the Quran paradise is imagined as a garden, the locating of the mortal remains of the deceased in a garden suggest a similar garden setting in paradise for the eternal soul.

SUNDER NURSERY

1947 was a landmark year for India, and also for Delhi. India attained its freedom from British rule, but then was immediately plunged into the disruption brought about by the partition of the country. As the capital, Delhi faced some unique challenges. For one, there was an explosion in the population in the city in the immediate post-Independence period. There was an influx of people displaced from the newly formed Pakistan, which led to a doubling of the city’s population in the period between the census years of 1941 and 1951. At least some part of this increase was also due to an expansion of numbers employed in the gov­ernment. The British colonial state did not concern itself with too many functions apart from maintaining law and order, extract­ing revenues, and developing infrastructure to help extract those revenues better. Contrary to this, the state in independent India aimed to undertake many other functions to promote welfare and development. As a result several new government ministries and departments were created.

To accommodate these increased numbers, new housing was created in the form of many of the colonies that we know today. All of these colonies needed greenery—in parks, in the form of avenue trees, and in the individual houses. To cater to this suddenly increased demand for plants, several new plant nurseries came up, of which the most prominent was Sunder Nursery, set up in the beginning of 1949.

The nursery was established on land that had a long hu­man history. Ever since the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya had been buried in the vicinity in 1325, and his tomb had become a revered shrine, or dargah, many others had wished to be buried close by. This reverence for the saint’s shrine continued down the centuries, and is indeed alive today. This is the reason why over time a large area around the dargah of Nizamuddin developed into a veritable necropolis—with tombs ranging from those in somewhat distant Lodi Garden, to Humayun’s tomb and many smaller tombs and graves close to the dargah. Specifically, it seems that a number of tombs came up in the 16th century in the land on which Sunder Nursery now stands.

Sunder Nursery is a veritable treasure trove when it comes to botany: on the one hand, it is a showcase for several exotic species; on the other, it’s a space where you can see trees and plants that are indigenous to India, but may not often be seen in Delhi. And it’s a home for species that were once widespread in Delhi, but are now not often seen even in this city.

(This is an edited excerpt from Gardens of Delhi by Swapna Liddle and Madhulika Liddle; photographs by Prabhas Roy (Niyogi Books; 236 pages; ₹1,950).

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