Riding on the rails of history
One can now take a Metro ride into the multi-faceted history of the ITO area: from the Supreme Court of India to the ruins of Feroz Shah Kotla as the much-awaited ITO Metro station opens up this evening extending the Delhi Metro’s heritage corridor from Mandi House to the ITO area. DMRC officials said that the exhibitions at Mandi House and ITO Metro stations are part of the organisation’s continuous bid to beautify its premises and “educate the masses” as they make their daily commute using the service.
Member-Secretary of Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) Gopinath Ravindran says that all buildings and institutions in this area have stories and anecdotes to tell. The Income Tax Office (ITO) was one of the first offices to open in this area, which gave the area its name. Various historic, academic and media institutions built in post-colonial India acquire space in this area.
“The Supreme Court building erected in the 1950s was shaped to project an image of the scales of justice,” Ravindran said, adding that the Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg has the story of the national press after Independence. ICHR has dug into archives and libraries to gather the historic photographs and old maps to tell the story of the transition of the area and its social history.
Ravindran said that the two big panels will portray the city panorama between the Supreme Court and the ruins of Feroz Shah Kotla. “We have gone a few kilometres on either side of this reference line and tried to tell the story of the buildings, institutions and the landmarks that came up in this zone,” he added.
One of the panels shows an old black-and-white image of the ITO, with very little traffic plying in an orderly fashion, a sight almost unimaginable today. Most of the structures and buildings at the ITO area came up in the first few decades after Independence and reflected the post-colonial Nehruvian aspirations of “building the new Republic” and the “free press,” says Ravindran.
While there was a wealth of material that could not be included in the panels for want of space, Ravindran says that they have provided URls and QR codes for people to further provoke and explore the history of the city. Ravindran says that the idea now is to get the details published in separate booklets about the two projects that ICHR has done so far so that people can further read, educate and delight themselves with history of their city.