Changing architecture.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Look at this photo snapped last week. Two balconies, one old, the other also said to be quite old but so newly renovated that the work on it is still to be completed, and it might not end up as a balcony at all. Both structures are worlds apart in their aesthetics. Together they evoke the evolution of a Delhi neighbourhood in which the defining visual character for a long time has been the architecture.

Named after freedom fighter Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, the Old Delhi avenue is bordered by fragments of the mostly vanished Walled City wall. It houses several publishing houses and book distribution companies, and lately parcel delivery services. It also has some of those aged mansions that evoke a Delhi which existed around the time of independence. But the district is changing, those edifices are giving way to the new. Today, as the photo shows, Ansari Road architecture is a hodgepodge of sensibilities from different eras.

No point in dwelling on Ansari Road’s new buildings. They look similar to the modern buildings anywhere in Delhi. The old buildings are less common. One huge house embodies the area’s signature style with its tall windows, massive doors, and little balconies roofed with cupolas. The main door stays locked, and some homeless citizens (who work as labourers) live on the pave just outside its walls.

Many other houses are similarly grand, but fortunately they are inhabited and well-maintained. Such as the residence with grills shaped into four numerals. “1938” might be the year the house was built. For many of the old Ansari Road landmarks came up during the 1930s and 1940s, as suggested by an inscribed plaque. One building has a staircase shaped into a series of irregular landings–it looks like a cloud pattern that might dissolve any moment. Another noteworthy building has its porch etched in Hindi with “Non-violence, the supreme religion.”

In the early 1960s, this was a neighbourhood of Chawri Bazar paper merchants and Chandni Chowk jewellers. After a big publishing firm shifted from Kanpur to Ansari Road in 1965, the locality—close to both New and Old Delhi railway stations—became the first choice for publishers to set up offices in the capital.

While you can exhaust an entire day surveying the Ansari Road architecture, one particular building is best viewed during the sunset. It has a balcony of lattice screen. In the evening, the gold sunlight pour through the pores of the lattice screen, and make a parallel lattice of light and shadows on the wall behind. This is the balcony seen in the photo.