Gladys Abankwa-Meier-Klodt’s book Delhi’s Diplomatic Domains digs deep into our colonial history. She spoke to Iknoor Kaur about allotment of land to the embassies, their architecture and unique symbols
When Gladys Abankwa-Meier-Klodt asked the Hungarian Embassy who the architect of their building was, they had no idea. They only knew of somebody who had contributed, many years ago, to the architectural design of the building. This irked Gladys so much that she decided to look for the name of the architect by herself and after a lot of reading she found the name. She did this only out of curiosity and her “obsession for knowing more”. So much for the obsession, she ended up writing an entire book on the diplomatic conclave in New Delhi. Her book Delhi’s Diplomatic Domains is all about the chanceries and residences of Chanakyapuri and imperial New Delhi. The author says that her quest for the book began with the lack of availability of information on the diplomatic conclave in the city. The cover of her book has a photograph of a chandelier in the Polish Embassy which explains her reasons for starting the research for the book. “When I saw the Polish Embassy I was thunderstruck because it is very different from the image I had of colonial buildings in New Delhi. It is an Art Deco building. Art Deco was a style that was prevalent between 1925 and 1939 that initiated in France and then spread all over the world. And I thought that Delhi’s colonial architecture was almost exclusively neoclassical. So I wanted to find out more about the architecture of these buildings and started looking for a book on it. I spent a lot of time looking for one and kept thinking that it’s not possible that there is no book on these buildings given that the situation in Delhi is quite unique. But I didn’t find anything so I decided to make it into a project for myself and find out as much as I could,” shares the author.
She adds that even the embassies didn’t know about their histories when she approached them. She elaborates, “Most of the embassies told me that I had given them information that they didn’t have themselves. In many cases where I had asked for information to direct me, nothing was available. So I had to look on my own and become very inventive because in some cases I didn’t speak the language of that country. I would then resort to Google Translate since I had to find what I was looking for and after a tedious search I would find something. I read people’s memoirs. I would find little snippets that had nothing to do with the diplomatic conclave but they would lead me somewhere eventually. It was information overload but I was immersed in the project. I always had to know more and delve deeper. Sometimes I would come home after being out all day and then I would sit down to do ‘little’ work and end up reading till next morning. I always got a crumb that led me in and doors kept opening thereafter. It was an unending passage.”
According to Gladys, the striking thing about New Delhi was the “extent” of its diplomatic conclave. She says, “You have diplomatic conclaves in other cities as well but most embassies there are located in a prestigious part of town which is usually close to the parliament, part of the royal palace or any other bastion of power and they are buildings that weren’t constructed to be embassies. They are mansions and other such structures. Also everywhere the embassies are together and not with ‘nothing’ else in between. But in Delhi for the first time countries could create symbols of national culture in architecture. So each embassy has the epidemy of the embassy paradigm which means they have what an embassy is supposed to have. In Delhi because of the amount of land allotted, you have the chancery, which is the office building, the ambassador’s residence and in many cases officers’ accommodation as well.”
Gladys found out the real reason behind the allocation of so much land. It was a solution to a problem that existed at that time, she says. “After Partition there were so many refugees from Pakistan, there was a new civil service that was created in India and all these people needed a place to live in. Since Jawaharlal Nehru wanted to attract as many countries as possible to establish embassies in Delhi at that time, a solution was found. In the bungalow zone, the outskirts were reserved for people who owned the buildings. Most of the other buildings were government buildings and Aurangzeb Road, Prithviraj Road and Amrita Shergill Marg were the private areas of bungalows owned by wealthy individuals. A lot of these people lived elsewhere and had additional homes in Delhi. So such properties were requisitioned by the government. Anybody who had a house they were not using personally, and if it was not being used as a place of worship, school, had to renounce the property temporarily to the government and those buildings then became either the residences of civil servants or diplomats. Most properties were first rented by the embassies and then later acquired by purchase. In that category you have Brazil, Turkey and Spain,” she explains.
Earlier Gladys wanted to make a simple coffee table book on this subject but she didn’t want to keep entire information to herself. “I wanted it to be my own personal souvenir. Thus, I put in everything that I would want to read and see in a book. I call it a large format book because text and images occupy the same amount of space,” she informs.