The man who keeps Gandhi’s room clean
This small house is all he knows of Mahatma Gandhi. “That takhat,” says Raju, pointing to a wooden bed, “is Gandhiji’s vishram-asan on which he would sleep.” Turning to a white mat on the floor, he explains that this was the spot where Gandhi would sit and meet the day’s visitors. Tucked within the premises of a beautiful Valmiki Temple on Delhi’s Mandir Marg, Bapu Niwas is touched with history. Here, Gandhi stayed from April 1, 1946, to June 1, 1947. Among a smattering of destinations marking his time in Delhi, this is perhaps the least known.
The spacious quiet room has the sanctity of a museum. You can actually touch the exhibits, including the wooden desk on which Gandhi would write. The walls are adorned with black-and-white photographs of Gandhi with famous people of the time.
“All of these photos were clicked here,” informs Raju with confidence. His duties include cleaning the historic room twice a day. And that photograph of Jinnah? “I don’t know much about this man,” he admits. “I studied only till third class... the family conditions were not good.” Waking up about around 4 am, “I do dusting, jharu pocha and cleaning of the photographs.” The temple management pays him a salary.
In his thirties, Raju’s early years offered no hint that his career would have such close proximity to an iconic figure. He grew up in the industrial town of Kanpur where his father worked in a plastic factory. He never imagined living in Delhi, and he “didn’t even know anything of Gandhiji” until he happened to visit a friend in the Capital who worked as a sewak (helper) at Bapu Niwas. “I stayed back,” says Raju.
As he chats on the platform outside the temple where Gandhi would hold evening sabhas, it becomes clear that while Raju might not be well versed with the larger story of Gandhi, he is intimately aware of the material aspects of Gandhi’s life that was spent in this little portion of Delhi. “I have never visited where he was killed and where he was cremated,” he says, talking of Gandhi Smriti (formerly Birla House) and Raj Ghat, respectively. To this man, the world of Gandhi is confined to Bapu Niwas.
The American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. considered MK Gandhi as “the guiding light of our technique of non-violent social change.” He visited India for a five-week tour in 1959, and on landing in Delhi’s Palam airport, famously declared: “To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim.”
Delhi’s India International Center (IIC) came up later in 1962 — designed by American architect Joseph Allen Stein — but it has a little-known spot that commemorates the spiritual bond between these two icons who incidentally never met.
The Gandhi-king Plaza is a snug little garden tucked into one corner of IIC. The next time you visit the membersonly club, instead of heading straight for the foyer, turn left from the driveway on to a pavement lined with potted plants. A few steps ahead lies one of the city’s best-kept secrets.
The first thing you’re likely to notice is a gray column with inscriptions of sayings, in English and Hindi, by both Gandhi and King. Two giant Pilkhan trees give the plaza its permanent shade. These trees are massive, their trunks extensively furrowed, as if made of molten metal; their bulky branches seemingly alive; and their leaves numbering a million, possibly more.
While the Gandhi-king Plaza occasionally hosts art exhibitions, you rarely see anyone lounging here. It lacks the showiness of the Lodhi Garden next door, with its 15th and 16th century tombs and well-laid-out walking paths. The plaza also has a little pond — Stein’s signature architectural style involved using nature.
Nevertheless, the place is ideal to soothe your excitable urban life, lulling you into tranquillity. The two Pilkhans conspire to create a Macondo of the mind, a place with no contact with the outside world. Though the roar of the traffic on the road outside does intrude into this leafy corner, the plaza feels supremely isolated, as remote as the legends of Gandhi and King appear to us today.