Figures from Madanji (Houses)

Bhatia, Gautam

Step 1: Build four walls using baked bricks and cement, punch equally spaced holes for windows. At bottom center take hole all the way to floor. Once walls have set place concrete lid above. Add steps to front door if desired. Preheat oven. © Gautam Bhatia

Step 2: Fill holes with windows, and place rain protection above each. Support door projection on pillars and get contractor to add random horizontal lines wherever he wishes. Sleep over the horizontal lines and pillars. © Gautam Bhatia

Step 3: Remove columns and horizontal lines and decorate windows with fresh early morning outlook of Classicism. Run plaster bands around windows; check central window for possible crown. Place balustrade above door projection. Sit back, relax, flip through European magazines. © Gautam Bhatia

Step 4: For a moment forget comfort and practicality. Concentrate on 21^st century ideals that should be stated on facade. Think Revival and Imitation. Knowing that the best things have already been done, start by building up cornices around windows in plaster. Add fake frame around door; stick traditional looking brackets under projection. Create artificial double corner to give depth to composition. Stir Spanish stucco onto surface, let simmer © Gautam Bhatia

Step 5: Open up Dictionary of Classical Forms. Borrow studied and known elements from the past and apply them with scholarly flourish. Plaster panels, pediments, medallions, curls, ionic and floral patterns ... stick them self-consciously all over facade, keeping in mind that architecture is poetry in stone. Twirl plaster as window edging till it drips, add delicate Italian balusters to projections to resemble French balcoy. With no door leading to it, it becomes a French balcony that can't be used but don't fret. As long as it's art, it's OK. © Gautam Bhatia

Step 6: Finally release all pent-up ideas from system. All images of building collected over years of foreign travel, bits of detail picked up from French cathedrals and Gujarati havelies, and other memories and lurking desires. Use Greek columns and capitals liberally to frame composition. Statuary may be applied according to taste. Sprinkle Indian terracotta and filigreed screens as garnishing. The final flavour should give off deep whiffs of European history emanating from a traditional Indian present. let dry for a day. Serves family of six. © Gautam Bhatia

Step 7 Accept builder's offer to demolish house and build flats. Take money, buy plot in suburbs, and start again from Step 1. © Gautam Bhatia

See also …

Bhatia, Gautam. Looking through Walls: Architecture in the age of McDonalds. New Delhi, India, 2001.
Bhatia, Gautam. "Domestic Buildings." In Looking through Walls: Architecture in the age of McDonalds. New Delhi, India, 2001.

We drove into his suburban bungalow in his new cream coloured Contessa with darkened windows, towelled seat covers to protect the original Vinyl upholstery, and plastic covers to protect the towelling. It was a car that was lovingly rubbed every day to impart an unnatural shine to its surface, a gloss unlikely to remain long on the grime of city streets. Two yellow headlamps had been installed in front, two flashing lights on the side, and a Lufthansa sticker on the tinted glass window in the rear, Lufthansa: A Flying Experience and I Love New York. Although Madanji had barely travelled beyond Panipat, the stickers gave people the impression that the rider was a well-seasoned traveller, a jet setter. And I imagine when the driver first eased the clutch into the chaos of Delhi traffic, Madanji must have felt the same flush of satisfaction the safari-suited Englishman felt on his adventure in Africa.

When we arrived at the gate, I couldn’t help notice the hybrid nature of the architecture. It was as if the architect, in some epileptic fit of aesthetic frenzy, had emptied his cluttered mind of all its stylistic condiments and dumped them on an unsuspecting façade. There are few buildings in this world that have the power to move one to such a level of decorative ecstasy. Daryaganj Rococo the hallmark of quiet opulence and subdued elegance is a style that combines in one easy flourish the grandness of an Italian villa, the stateliness of an English bungalow and the traditional charm of an Indian haveli. But it does so in a way that discreetly accentuates these qualities as minor shortcomings. Madanji’s house rose high to express the grandness of the villa, tried to stretch its flanks to duplicate the openness of the bungalow, and at the same time attempted the compactness of a haveli. It wasn’t easy. Its size was too large for the awkward little plot, situated neither on the road nor far enough removed from it. On one side the house was shoved up against a Baroque wedding cake, on the other side it shared a wall with a manor inspired by some remote tribal style. Strips of grass surrounding the house were meticulously maintained, but as lawn they were rarely used. Picture windows, the kind used to frame Himalayan landscapes or gentle seascapes, exposed the house to the afternoon sun. Upstairs, delicate balconies projected out towards a noisy, polluted road while inside, many of the bedrooms, isolated from one another, looked directly onto the neighbour’s bedroom. I could see why he needed an architect; because except for ownership, there was little that was private about Madanji’s house.

Altogether it was an architecture which, like Madanji’s life, sought desperately to balance modernity with tradition. As a master artist Madanji believed that building was one thing, architecture entirely another. A building after all was a collection of rooms large and small, dark and airless, and followed no particular plan and its worth was measured merely by the quantity of space it enclosed, never by the quality of life it generated. Architecture was merely the application on the exterior. The house was painted puke green, soft and mellow, the colour of early morning dew. Parts of it were also red, some even blue. Walls were also textured like frosting on a cake and they ended near the roof in the crenelations of a Gothic castle. A Spanish tile roof reminiscent of ancient haciendas angled across the top.

The interior of the house was decorated in Early Linoleum. In the living room, steel highback chairs with angled headrests were arranged around a centre table of painted bamboo. A nylon bath rug lay under it, a Tudor coffee table with matching plastic ashtrays sat on a plush orange nylon carpet as a secondary side arrangement; in the comer were traditional brass lamps with slick modem shades. A contemporary dinette of tubular steel and a rococo trolley sat in the adjoining dining room. A green velvet sofa with gold piping juxtaposed against a wall paper of a New England autumn scene formed the decoration at the stair hall, the entrance room intimately nicknamed the “great atrium”. Stuck away somewhere on the profuse red and yellow foliage of the poster was also a reproduction of a delicate drawing by Michelangelo. Madanji believed in abundance balanced by a quiet understated elegance.

Every morning when he breezed downstairs into the great atrium hall in his crumpled kurta-pyjama, he stooped in front of the life-size portrait of Babaji and sighed with the happiness of a man waking to a realisation of his success. For a while the two of them would stare at each other, eyes locked in passionate adoration of each other’s skills. He readjusted the garland of four-day old marigolds around the benign face of the frizzy haired guru, the god man from South India whose hair formed a convenient halo about his pious head. With his head bowed Madanji issued a silent, heartfelt prayer: d Babaji, give me your courage, your conviction, your money…your hair…

At home Madanji was a deeply religious man. Next to his copy of Stardust you would invariably find a copy of the Bhagwad Gita. ...

* * * *

Beyond the limited experience of home, Madanji needed time on the city’s social network. It was important to mingle with people who had made mingling a lifelong social phenomenon. Moreover, in having forefathers who had wisely invested recurring interests in family ventures, most members felt reassured that mingling could even be practised during working hours. Madanji was a member of Delhi’s prestigious Gymkhana that bastion of urban finesse where men and women of rank, style and effect have been left floundering on twenty year waiting lists, hoping that someday, some retired brigadier would keel over at a bridge table and they would find their rightful place in society. But these are matters best left to providence. And Madanji need not have worried. He had connections.

Now on those sultry, North Indian evenings when the Delhi air was heavy with the mist of intrigue and gossip, Mr and Mrs headed straight for the Gymkhana. There, driving past the rusticated façade of the Palladian library in their towelled Contessa, past dusty glass cases displaying the frayed jackets of year old Sidney Sheldons and reprints of Wodehouse, they entered the neo Georgian portals of the abandoned British Club. The vines had grown high, higher than the good old days, when Caucasian faces hung in sombre profiles in the entrance hall. These had been discreetly removed into the store and, in their place, the club had rewritten its ancestry by substituting a line of indigenous faces in sombre profile. But replacing the building was an altogether different task, the columns and arches still spoke of an era gone by; the bougainvillaea that draped the architecture could not cover the colonial ancestry.

Madanji wore a leisure safari suit, with a twisted sidelong cut and an i array of playful ruffles around the pocket; this was evening, after all, a time to relax; the licensing officials were far away. The Mrs wore a high tensile nylon sari from her Fall collection, one which would easily give way to any late evening antics. Above this, areas of the body, where any kind of suspension or encircling was possible, vyere decorated by a local jewellery store that accepted Citibank Master Card. There was a demonstration to be made to the less privileged lower breed of lifelong members, despite the difficulties of undressing for a casual flip in the pool. In the distance, the chlorinated waters of the Lady Willingdon Swimming Bath glistened in the paling evening light. And when Mrs Madanji jumped, bottom first, into the shallow end, and flapped about listlessly, her wide ranging splashes made it quite clear who she really was she was the burra memsahib now, and entitled to all the privileges that came with the title the Vimtos and the fashion magazine exchange, the rummy and the Sunday brunches.

When she finished her water ballet, the fleshy mermaid emerged, rippling the water with her flesh. Sitting under a mufti coloured beach umbrella to bask in the fluorescene of a naked tube light, she dipped her stubby fingers into a plate of fish fingers and guzzled noisily into a lime cordial. It was then, gazing into the distant horizon of the parking lot to bring the towelled Contessa into view, that she felt the immense satisfaction of a dream fulfilled, and realised in long cherished mouth watering gulps what Buddha must have felt only as a fleeting moment, when he sat under the Bodhi tree.

But Madanji’s new life was full of other interesting diversions. He was also a patron of the arts. At a concert of classical music to benefit the victims of some cyclone hit area in Andhra he would be found only in the five hundred rupee seat, right behind that of the minister inaugurating the event. It was a good vantage. Good enough for him to turn towards the audience from time to time, gazing back with a kind of wistful nonchalance with the hope that his profile may appear alone with the minister’s in the morning paper. Like everybody else, he sat with a face of intense reverie. His underwear pinch and his safari shirt buttons we about to pop.

In matters of entertainment however, culture was never a first preference. Madanji’s favourite entertainment was attending weddings. Not the intimate family weddings of eight hundred in some small house somewhere. No. His were the intimate weddings of five thousand, set in maidans under acres of coloured tents, at least a five day orgy of food and drink. He had learnt to cherish the intensity of these events with the naturalness of a man giving in wholeheartedly to the experience. He arrived at his son’s wedding an occasion which I too attended out of a sense of professional courtesy with as much fanfare as the bridegroom himself. A rented white limousine pulled up at the Swagatam gateway, Madanji emerged from the upholstery, a surreal emanation dressed entirely in white. Wearing the exact outfit Tom Wolfe displays on the dust jackets of his books.

Distance and darkness blurs the memory. It came to me as some mystical experience from Kubla Khan or Arabian Nights. Amid the smoke from the dung fires of surrounding villages, the Delhi air, additionally shrouded by winter mist, scattered the light of the million coloured bulbs into a hazy gloom; we walked on and on. …

Content Related to this Document

Domestic Buildings

Bhatia, Gautam. "Domestic Buildings." In Looking through Walls: Architecture in the age of McDonalds. New Delhi, India, 2001.
Looking through Walls: Architecture in the age of McDonalds

Bhatia, Gautam. Looking through Walls: Architecture in the age of McDonalds. New Delhi, India, 2001.
High Raise of Bunglows

Bhatia, Gautam. "High Raise of Bunglows." In Looking through Walls: Architecture in the age of McDonalds. New Delhi, India, 2001.
Tower of Babbel

Bhatia, Gautam. "Tower of Babbel." In Looking through Walls: Architecture in the age of McDonalds. New Delhi, India: Architexturez Imprints, 2001.

Friday, October 25, 2019 - 16:54 - The 10th annual IIDA Global Excellence Awards
Wednesday, February 7, 2007 - 07:32 - [in-enaction] Invitation for Conference
Friday, January 27, 2017 - 10:15 - TRAI issues recommendations on in-building infrastructure
Friday, June 21, 2019 - 17:53 - Mumbai's Esplanade Mansion, where Jinnah played pool, awaits facelift

Document Metadata

EndNote - RIS

Aζ South Asia

Critique

...to Construct

Conservation

Critique

Dialogue

Education

Enaction

GREHA (गृह)

Listings

MPISG

Publications

RTI Cases

Writing

Search this digital archive

Figures from Madanji (Houses)

See also …

spacer-600.jpg

Domestic Buildings

Looking through Walls: Architecture in the age of McDonalds

High Raise of Bunglows

Tower of Babbel