Gardens of resistance

Abstract

Over the last few millennia, the city that today is the seat to the world's largest "democracy" has served as the nerve center for generations of empires and emperors, political paradigms and intersecting identities. As for most capital cities such as New Delhi, alongside entrenched political regimes come the evolution of a parallel legacy of fighting against, opposing and obstructing, and resisting. Whether manifesting as the rallying cries at mass protests, as the purposeful strokes on canvas in practices of critical art, or as the defiant lyrics and rhythms in musical compositions, resistance is instrumental in the vocabulary of any effective political vision. Considering the Central Vista Complex in Lutyens' New Delhi specifically, we look at a political urban fabric that has embodied these simultaneous histories for the past century, as a site of power and of resistance to that same power, as belonging to the governing and to the governed. Built as a monumental colonial project in opposition to Delhi's existing Mughal city center in 1911, appropriated as a symbol of a new nation's power as a post colonial inversion in 1947, serving as a site for rallies, protests, and parades engaging the growing pains of independence and modernization in 60s and 70s, and finally as part of a repressive, autocratic re-branding resisting due process and dialogue in 2020, the site's spatial politics have also witnessed a plethora of resistances. This thesis questions the role of architecture in envisioning and engaging the tools of resistance in the context of such political sites. It narrates the stories of three actors as they reclaim the Complex's Mughal Gardens - landscapes historically seen as spaces of utopic experimentation and speculation - as spaces of their own resistance. Considering the architectural tools of process, scale, materiality, and temporality, the actors strive to re-inscribe an entirely new set of contemporary cultural and civic values into an otherwise charged landscape, a form of socio-spatial resistance in response to their own historical moments.