From the technocratic laboratory of the American-sponsored Masterplan came a powerful body to serve and protect the city.
Formed from smaller bureaucracies that had recently been cut up and shredded,
this body, aka the Delhi Development Authority, or DDA, was handed a total monopoly of all the land in the city.
The DDA moved very slowly, but the people underfoot moved very fast.
The results are what Jai Sen famously called the 'unintended city,’ and the evidence is everywhere…
…not just the millions living in unauthorized construction,
but whenever you see historic sites menaced by new developments…
That was unintended.
Or when you see semi-legal lal dora (red string) villages become boutique outdoor malls…
That was unintended.
Or when you see public land squatted by the rich where they build flimsy replicas of Rajput palaces and rent them out for weddings at exorbitant rates…
That was unintended too.
Modern Delhi was unintended.
And there is no stopping it.
As the artist Oroon Das said with a wry smile:
“You see, we Indians are like ants. We will just keep building and building.”
American fears of Communism and rigid models of the modern city led to a plan that failed spectacularly in Delhi, now a place where poor slum dwellers. and wealthy squatters may be different by degree, but not by kind.
Back to Kingsway Camp and the ants…
Keeping refugees calm on a hot night using film screenings was just one of thousands of actions by Americans in the late forties that were cumulatively focused on one thing: ensuring that India does not ‘fall.’