From the Ruins of Chanakya: Exhibition History and Urban Memory

From the Ruins of Chanakya: Exhibition History and Urban Memory

Resplendent in its new state-of-the-art incarnation as New Delhi’s second luxury mall, the erstwhile single screen Chanakya theatre, rased to the ground 10 years ago, opened in October 2017 as Chanakya Mall. In its current mall-multiplex form, the structure is slated to make a new statement in the city’s image building exercise and retail trends. Although considerably smaller than the first luxury mall, DLF-Emporio in Vasant Kunj, the makers of the new mall boast that it will house the world’s most exclusive, top-end, luxury brands, as well as a sophisticated three-screen multiplex directed at the city’s elite. ¹ The luxury mall holds a conceptual significance in Delhi’s increasingly divisive and zonal approach to creating a ‘world-class city’.

Chanakya Mall was initially envisioned as part of a grand scheme of changes to ‘brand’ the city for an international community of business executives, investors, tourists and diplomats in the run up to the 2010 Commonwealth Games held in New Delhi. After a protracted legal battle, the judgment went in favour of the Mall replacing the popular Chanakya theatre that had stood at this site for almost 40 years. The dispute between the New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) and the former licensee and managing director of Chanakya theatre, Rajesh Khanna, began towards the end of the 1990s, when a 10-year contract was about to expire. Until then, Khanna, assisted by his younger brother and son, had run the theatre successfully for almost three decades, since 1970, with regular contract renewals. The climate, however, changed in the late 1990s after economic liberalisation led to dramatic changes in the film industry and its theatrical landscape. Delhi’s first multiplex, Priya Village Roadshow (PVR) Anupam in Saket, opened successfully in 1997 and, in the same year, the refurbished single screen theatre, PVR Priya in Vasant Vihar, single-handedly transformed a remote location into a high-end neighbourhood attraction. Around this time, the NDMC-owned Chanakya, located in an exclusive neighbourhood, expectedly became a prime target for corporate entities driving the multiplex revolution and eager to expand into strategic locations in the city. Faced with lucrative deals from these corporations, NDMC finally decided to terminate the relatively modest contract with Rajesh Khanna, resulting in a protracted legal conflict between the parties. ²

While Chanakya’s wide community of loyal audiences grew increasingly anxious about the threats of demolition during the ensuing 7-year court battle, a key development in the legal case was the demand made by the country’s architects to preserve the structure’s distinctive modernist heritage. To counter this preservation narrative, NDMC generated a counter discourse for reimagining the city. It ‘updated’ its initial proposal at the Supreme Court proceedings by bringing into the argument the impending Commonwealth Games. This proposal suggested the construction of an ‘international standard’ mall-multiplex complex that would showcase the city’s advanced ‘world-class status’. ³ The NDMC’s new terms of debate clearly drew on the accelerated expansion of multiplexes and malls in major cities across India as representing the foremost architectural insignia of the country’s globalising economy (refer Athique & Hill, 2010; Sharma, 2003; Voyce, 2007). Given that the NDMC struck a deal with corporate entities and sidestepped Rajesh Khanna’s demand to be handed the building and management of the multiplex project, the Chanakya legal case also marked a transition from an older production-based managerial role for the government to its new entrepreneurial role of public–private partnership geared to inflate the image of consumption-led economies (refer Cronin & Hetherington, 2008).

The NDMC received bids for the two-acre plot from 25 of the country’s major companies. The coveted high-profile project was finally handed over to DLF Ltd, one of India’s largest real estate firms, with a monopoly status in Delhi-NCR. The multiplex venture was assigned to PVR Ltd, the first—and one of the leading—multiplex chains in the country. Ironically, due to the scandal and sudden financial decline of the DLF Corporation soon after the handover, the luxury mall could not be completed for the Games event. Nonetheless, its pressing rhetoric undoubtedly expedited the court case in favour of NDMC, culminating in the demolition of the city’s most cherished theatre in 2008 amid much dissension: shock and mourning rippled through the city.

This article is an attempt to understand the Chanakya story and its theatrical legacy as a prehistory of globalisation. Chanakya was a revolutionary phenomenon in the exhibition industry, in its time redefining film consumption, leisure and urban life in Delhi in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. As a precursor to the multiplex, Chanakya theatre had, by the early 2000s, become a potent symbolic remnant of the single screen era. Even as other single screen theatres buckled under pressure in the period of multiplex expansion, the Chanakya theatre continued to attract audiences and maintained a persistent presence as one of the city’s most popular theatres, screening English-language, cult and art-house films, as well as Bollywood blockbusters. As the demolition of the theatre became an inevitability, its mostly middle-class audiences began to retrospectively assess the theatre’s profound bearing on their lives, while architects initiated a debate about contemporary heritage and the need to preserve Chanakya’s prominent brutalist architecture. All these voices of resistance were bypassed in the onward march of globalisation, with the result that a monumental architecture of the recent past was suddenly declared obsolete. Chanakya’s immense popularity turned its demolition into an iconoclastic event that revealed a complex relationship among cinema, space, cultural memory and nostalgia (refer Boyer, 2001; Kuhn, 2002; Abbas, 1997).

Neighbourhood, Architecture and a New Theatrical Imagination

As is evident from the controversy outlined previously, one of the key factors leading to Chanakya’s demolition was its prestigious, prime location in Chanakyapuri. Built in the 1950s, the Chanakyapuri district remains to this date one of the most exclusive and attractive parts of the city. The neighbourhood was imagined as an extension of Lutyens’ Delhi, the pre-independence colonial capital built in the 1910s. ⁴ Lutyens’ Delhi contains the President’s House or Rashtrapati Bhawan, the Parliament House and in the surrounding area many other important public institutions including the Supreme Court of India. Also known as the Diplomatic Enclave, Chanakyapuri includes the Prime Minister’s house, all the major embassies and residential bungalows for diplomats, politicians, bureaucrats and other officials. ⁵ Built just after India’s independence, Chanakyapuri emerged as an archetypal representative of modern planning. While the city at large has steadily experienced change, congestion, decay and uncontrolled expansion, Chanakyapuri stands almost unencumbered by these shifts to exist as a historic district with monumental buildings, memorials and public sculptures. The neighbourhood also contains old and prestigious hotels, clubs and public parks. The few urban villages and ghettos are carefully cordoned off from Chanakyapuri’s scenic vistas of orderly boulevards, handsome architecture and manicured lawns.

Despite Chanakyapuri’s advantageous location, at the time of Chanakya cinema theatre’s construction in 1969, when South Delhi was barely developed, its placement appeared to be at variance with the established industrial formulae of situating theatres in busy and commercially viable thoroughfares. The NDMC, instead, situated Chanakya outside the industrial sphere as part of a brand-new community centre in an as then remote corner of the neighbourhood. Its materialisation was part of the larger development programme of Chanakyapuri as a modern, secular neighbourhood organised around recreational sites. The Yashwant Place Community Centre was thus designed as a conglomerate of hotel, shopping arcade and cinema theatre. ⁶

Other than its comparatively remote location, in the early days a major setback for Chanakya was the inconvenience caused by an unfinished railway bridge underpass on the Africa Avenue—the only link connecting Chanakya to Sarojini Nagar, from where audiences were originally expected to be drawn. ⁷ This left Chanakya struggling for an audience at its inception. The theatre could barely be started by its first management, which bailed out after a brief 1-year period. After taking over the reins, Rajesh Khanna also faced severe challenges for the initial few years and, despite the buzz around the grand new building, business associates would recurrently scoff at Khanna for running a theatre in the ‘jungles’. ⁸

Like its location just off Africa Avenue, Chanakya’s architecture was also strikingly unconventional. Tall and imposing, with an austere façade made of bare concrete, Chanakya adopted the architectural style used for most government and public institutional buildings during the 1960s and 1970s. The entire Yashwant Place Community Centre, including Chanakya, adopted Brutalism for its architectural form (refer Lang, 2002). Selected in a national competition, Chanakya’s brutalist design by architect P. N. Mathur would become one of the foremost modernist structures of the city and a strikingly innovative model for a cinema theatre. Mathur drew creatively on the ‘naked expression of truth’ associated with functionalism to lend a unique vision to the cinema theatre’s form and purpose. ⁹ Chanakya materialised as a concrete ship, or ‘pallika’ as it was referred to in the official papers. Its colossal auditorium formed a giant hollowed-out structure, providing the building with its peculiarly monolithic look. Palpably described in an audience memoir as ‘the cemented Titanic waiting for take-off in the middle of nowhere’, Chanakya conjoined bricks and mortar with fantasy (Kazmi, 2005, p. 7). The theatre seemed to promise its audience the aura of an enchanting vessel that would transport them to startlingly novel and otherworldly landscapes of cinema and leisure.

The brutalist quality of ‘massing’—engineering that produced a rough weighty appearance—was most skilfully achieved in Chanakya, lending the theatre its bulky form (Figures 1 and 2). Massing also kept the interior of the theatre free of columns and allowed for a rather large auditorium space with more than a thousand seats, making the theatre one of the largest in the city (refer Khanna & Parhawk, 2008). While the massive hollow structure was supported by splayed struts rising from the base, steel cables on the outside hanging from the roof to the bottom of the upper floor counterbalanced the weight of the building and imparted a streamlined look. Another significant element was the theatre’s side balconies. This feature was original in dispensing with the separate balcony box that had been central to the architectural and socially segregated character of other cinema theatres in India. Unlike the ostentatious interiors of most other theatres, Chanakya’s lobby area was devoid of any elaborate decoration. By contrast, Regal and Plaza, which were part of the colonial Connaught Place built during the early 1930s, wore pristine white classical facades of arches and paired columns (Vinnels & Brent, 2002). Built in the 1950s, Odeon combined a curious blend of Connaught Place’s classical design and later, during renovation in the 1960s, incorporated the modernist touches of well-known artist Satish Gujral. Shiela Cinema in central Delhi also stood out for its colourful blue and yellow façade, brandishing its huge, wide screen as a display in concrete (Ibid.).

Giuliana Bruno has perceptively stated that film ‘needs a space, a public site—a movie “house”. It is by way of architecture that film turns into cinema’ (Bruno, 2003, p. 44). Chanakya’s unconventional architecture and location were key factors in shaping the theatre’s distinctive course in the city’s exhibition landscape. Compared to other theatres, Chanakya’s location in the highbrow diplomatic enclave imparted a unique aura to it. Moreover, the relative inaccessibility and unavailability of an immediate audience led Rajesh Khanna to reimagine the site, not as a neighbourhood theatre but as an exclusive English-language theatre to pull in an audience from all parts of the city. Most importantly, Chanakya’s unique stand-alone construction and its placement inside an organic enclosure allowed it to emerge as a space of combined consumerism, prefiguring some of what would follow during the multiplex expansion. The move from NDMC’s abstract model to the actual functioning of the theatre was, however, complex and challenging.

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Figure 1.

Photo Courtesy: Debashree Mukherjee (March, 2008)

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Photo Courtesy: Debashree Mukherjee (March, 2008)

Exhibiting English-language and Art Cinema

Chanakya screened both English-language and Bombay cinema blockbusters in almost equal measure during the four decades of its existence. The theatre, however, acquired its iconic status in the city in relation to Hollywood and festival films. The diverse programming ensured a prominence for Chanakya amid the steep decline of the single screen theatre that began in the 1970s.

During its origins in the colonial period, the cinema theatre in India had been seen as an unruly space by the colonial government (refer Hughes, 2000; Sethi, 2009; Srinivas, 2000). Its modern and inclusive commercial set-up posed a severe challenge to age-old practices of class, caste and gendered hierarchies prevalent in Indian society. As a result, the premises of the single screen cinema theatres were marked by vigilant crowd control measures through separate seating, entrances and exits. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the 1970s and 1980s, the advent of home entertainment led to a rapid decline of these urban spaces (Vasudevan, 2003). In addition, a predominantly male presence at the theatres led to a sharp drop in female and family audiences. Against the gradual proletarianisation of the single screen theatres, Chanakya emerged as an antithesis. Organising its advanced infrastructural, technological and locational features around the niche programming of English-language films and art cinema, the theatre prefigured a multiplex imagination to attract a gentrified middle-class audience.

Chanakya’s beginnings in the late 1960s were, however, bleak. As an outsider to Delhi’s exhibition circuit, Khanna was faced with an extremely intimidating environment characterised by monopolistic alliances, rigid territorialities and operations based on established trade logistics. Considering Chanakya’s unconventionally isolated setting, the procurement of films from distributors proved to be a major hurdle. The ‘A-list’ films or the popular fare, for both Hollywood and Hindi language films, were already monopolised by the old Connaught Place theatres in Central Delhi—Regal, Odeon and Plaza—and Kamal cinema in South Delhi. However, a period of major economic and political changes in the country that followed the rise of Indira Gandhi as India’s prime minister provided the opportunity for Khanna to raise Chanakya theatre from its disadvantaged position.

One of Indira Gandhi’s policy decisions in the early years of her regime was a tightening of government control over the country’s commercial and trade operations. This caused a huge blow to Hollywood’s business prospects in India, severing an already volatile relationship between the Indian government and Motion Picture Exchange Association of America (MPEAA). Hollywood’s presence in India before liberalisation in 1991 was characterised by frequent skirmishes with the Indian government in the form of import restrictions, censorship, repatriation limits and Hollywood’s countertrade embargos (Govil, 2015). ¹⁰ In 1971, when a 4-year agreement with the MPEAA came to an end, the Indian government resorted to stricter import guidelines. The MPEAA reacted to this with an unprecedented and prolonged embargo lasting for 3 years until 1975 (p. 87). Getting wind of the embargo from business associates before its official announcement, and quick to recognise an opportunity to finally procure good quality films, Khanna approached Hollywood distributors directly. In a sweeping move, Khanna bought up the hundreds of copies of film prints still in India before the MPEAA finally shut down business (Vasudevan, Ahmed, & Pal, personal interview, 2003). As a result, during the 3-year blockade, Chanakya emerged as the sole theatre in the city—and even the country—with Hollywood fare. Rajesh Khanna also created his own distribution company Chanakya Pictures to supply films to other parts of the country. The embargo coup significantly flipped the power dynamics in Chanakya’s favour.

As a film aficionado, one of Rajesh Khanna’s key visions for Chanakya was to build a special environment for Hollywood films. ¹¹ He mobilised Hollywood action, adventure and historical genres to flaunt Chanakya’s sophisticated technical facilities. The period film Cromwell (Ken Hughes, 1970), for example, was the first to be screened in 1971 in ‘Chanakyarama’, Chanakya’s state-of-the-art, curved widescreen. Chanakyarama was unique in the city and had been designed after careful assessment of the projection box’s angle and distance from the screen. ¹² In 1974, another major innovation was added to Chanakya during the screening of the Spaghetti Western My Name is Nobody (Sergio Leone, Tonino Valerii, 1974), when powerful surround-sound boxes were introduced. Khanna cleverly christened the new technology ‘Sense O Sound’ after the well-known 1970s American brand ‘Sensurround’. With the special surround acoustics system, action films became Chanakya’s specialty and the sensational James Bond series screened exclusively at Chanakya.

At the end of the 1970s, Khanna began a popular trend of screening reruns of older classic films such as Dr Zhivago (David Lean, 1965), The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965), The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956), Where Eagles Dare (Brian G. Hutton, 1968), Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), Mackenna’s Gold (J. Lee Thompson, 1969) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957). Khanna explained in an interview that, for the rerun of The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson and Alexander Mackendrick, 1961), he designed a large poster collage in the lobby area with newspaper clippings from the film’s first release in India. ¹³ Despite the simultaneous screening of a new film Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970) at Odeon, the interest rekindled by such innovative publicity drew a large crowd to Chanakya theatre. The screening of Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean, 1970) was another unusual event. Khanna blew up a still image from the film, drawing attention to the theme of adultery which was absent in the inconspicuous official poster. Although the film failed across the country, Ryan’s Daughter’s first day in Chanakya witnessed cars lining up all the way to the Asoka Hotel, located 2 km away. ¹⁴ Apart from in-house posters, Chanakya’s growing popularity encouraged its management to circulate special film bulletins, just as was the practice in film society clubs. This provided the theatre’s activities with a special communitarian character. These accounts of Hollywood’s staging in Chanakya brings into relief Stephen Hughes’ observation that films are performative social events that are constantly rearticulated through the specific historical situations of public exhibition (Hughes, 2003). Just as Hollywood lent a cosmopolitan character to local geography, infrastructure and the audience, the success of English-language films was not a given but staged to generate meaning through exhibition strategies.

In the 1980s, Chanakya acquired the status of a quasi-art-house theatre. During this decade, India’s economic policy was gradually moving from its language of self-sufficiency and developmentalism to mass consumerism. One of the offshoots of these liberalisation policies was the sudden explosion of international festivals in the 1980s, as a means to establish local urban identities in a growing international sphere (refer Stringer, 2001). ¹⁵ This period also saw more active involvement of the state in the film industry. The National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), created in 1975 to boost alternative cinema in India, also sought to increase India’s presence in the international film festival circuits. In 1982, the NFDC collaborated with British companies in the production of Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982), which premiered in Chanakya as a major event. The Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust (James Ivory, 1983) also premiered in Chanakya. A week-long David Lean festival was held during June 1985, with proceeds going to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund. Apart from official festivals, under the management of Rajesh Khanna’s younger brother, Rakesh Khanna, also a well-travelled, enterprising ‘showman’ and passionate cinema lover, Chanakya held its own in-house festivals of leading Indian and international filmmakers of that time, including Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, Mrinal Sen, Francois Truffaut, Woody Allen and many others (Times of India, 1984, p. 6). The frequent festivals, premieres and other community events, along with regular commercial screenings, created a cultural field for the initiation of a wider public into the folds of a diverse and alternative cinema-going practice.

The Community Centre: Urban Recollections and Cosmopolitan Cultures

Remembrance is a complex interplay of time and space wrote Walter Benjamin in his writings on Berlin (1979, p. 295). Both the time remembered and the time of remembering are part of a complex constellation. Benjamin demonstrated this by looking at the specific form of the remembrance of childhood. For the adult, childhood memories invoke the city’s past as a place of ‘wonderment’, a sentient repository of emotions and anticipations, unknown discoveries, dreams and desires for a future. In these recollections, the past as well as the present are revealed in the fullness of time, and the adult encounters the buried and unfulfilled utopian hopes of the past. The disappearance of a structure or artefact of the recent past can trigger a collective awakening wherein subjective recollections endow the built environment with an emotional charge that remains distinctly different from official representations of the city (Buck-Morss, 1989, p. 273).

Benjamin’s reflections allow us a unique opportunity to understand Chanakya as a potent site of urban memory. The theatre’s impending demise led to a widespread outpouring of individual memories associated with the theatre. These testimonies allow us to access ‘hidden crevices’ in order to stage an alternative account of the city’s past. It is this cosmopolitan prehistory and the memory associated with Chanakya that I now turn to.

Some of the earliest audience memoirs surfaced in 2005, around the time of the High Court verdict. Two of these, by the late film critics Nikhat Kazmi and Amita Malik, appeared in The Times of India and Hindustan Times (Kazmi, 2005; Malik, 2005). It is evident from their accounts that, for the generation of the 1970s and 1980s, growing up ‘in the too-few-foreign-films era’ (Anonymous Blogger, 2007), the films themselves carried symbolic cultural capital and value for a certain English-speaking community. This is expressed in Kazmi’s views in ‘Here front-benchers were nerds’ (Kazmi, 2005, p. 7):

They called it Chanakya, the breeding ground of the quintessential fillum buff who danced to Abba, read Spinoza, recited J. A. Prufrock’s Love Song verbatim and generally measured life in coffee spoons …

Kazmi reminisces about the collective excitement over screenings of films such as Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) and Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean, 1970) during a period of film scarcity. The films were ‘running to house full in saddi Dilli!’ The memoir portrays the theatre as a source of local pride and nostalgia, when a single theatre and its exclusive films brought together audiences from across the city as a community of film lovers (ibid.).

Chanakya’s standing as a ‘community institution’ is reiterated by Malik in her article ‘Culture Vulture’, in which she ruminates about the theatre’s ‘human touch’ (Malik, 2005). She presents Rakesh Khanna as a familiar communitarian figure, ‘Uncle Chanakya’. Chanakya theatre is spoken of as integral to the city’s social and cultural scene for its interactive events such as premieres and children’s programmes:

… Chanakya was not only a discreet place where students in love could hold hands, but where Delhi’s film buffs gathered for quality cinema. Its glory years, 1970–92, under the ownership (sic) of Rakesh Khanna are unforgettable.

… Khanna did things in style … everything was grand not least of all Khanna’s jewelry boutique on the ground floor, where film writers such as myself dropped in for lively academic and professional arguments …

… There was also the human touch. I got a letter from six school children requesting me to ask ‘Uncle Chanakya’ to show children’s films, followed by a Walt Disney Festival where 1000 children came in fancy dresses for The Jungle Book …

While Malik and Kazmi’s memoirs relay a certain ‘structure of feeling’ in which films appear central to the audience’s attraction for Chanakya, later generations recount diverse memories of other social and recreational activities linked to film viewing. This shift seems to have occurred during the mid-1980s when the Yashwant Place Community Centre expanded alongside the theatre. Khanna’s younger brother Rakesh Khanna’s special efforts to attract children and youth through targeted screenings and events imparted a quaint character of ‘leisureliness’ to this enclosure. Let me now reflect on this extended topography around Chanakya.

Yashwant market complex, the once famed but now more or less ghostly shopping arcade, was connected directly to the back entrance of Chanakya. Chiefly targeting the non-Indian population of the neighbourhood, Yashwant market complex developed as a tourist and expat shopping centre with department stores, meat shops, travel agencies and ethnic souvenir stores. The market flourished when the Indian government relocated an enterprising trading community of Sikh deportees from Afghanistan to this location. During the mid-1980s, for a period of roughly 6 years, a phenomenal ‘Russian wave’ hit this market when traders initiated a practice of selling leather garments and fur coats to Russian dealers who bought the commodities in bulk to sell them at higher rates in Russia. ¹⁶ The market’s days of glory ended with the breakup of the USSR, the tightening of import policies and a plague scare in 1994, all of which became a strong deterrent for Russian traders. Although the Yashwant market complex did not cater to the locals, its prominent presence and everyday sensorium can scarcely be extricated from the experience of Chanakya’s audience. The market provided a curious visual landscape to the community centre due to its conspicuous use of Russian signage (Figure 3). Despite its current state of decline, for a casual stroller, even today, the market continues to exude a distinctly exotic air because of the signboards, the presence of foreign patrons, the odd display of touristic merchandise and a distinctive sonic environment of fluent Russian and broken English exchanged between shopkeepers and their clients.

Unlike the expat-oriented leather market in the open-air premises of the Yashwant market complex, a string of local fast-food joints or ‘dhabas’ serving Indo-Chinese and north Indian cuisine catered directly to Chanakya’s audience. These shack-like restaurants came up in the early 1990s and continue to be popular even now (Figure 4). For several years, the shops gained immensely from Chanakya’s footfall and expanded rapidly into its present assemblage of more than 20 restaurants. ¹⁷ While the shopping arcade and Chinese restaurants lent a special hybrid character to the community centre and created an attractive open-air environment for cruising and dining, other unconventional recreational zones set up by Chanakya’s management greatly enhanced the movie-going experience. In the early 1980s, Chanakya’s trendy video parlour Fantasia became an extremely popular phenomenon with youngsters. However, due to a falling-out with his co-sponsors, the following year Khanna approached a new fast-food restaurant chain, Nirula’s. With its chic interiors and a mix of Indian and American fast-food, Nirula’s became one of the most attractive destinations for youth and family outings. Much before the influx of actual foreign brands in India, these consumer spaces created a powerful environment of ‘elsewhere’, and Chanakya became a source of social distinction for Delhi’s middle classes as a space in which to partake of new ‘Western’ trends, an experience that was both imaginative and embodied.

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Figure 3.

Photo Courtesy: Ipsita Sahu (January, 2010).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Photo Courtesy: Ipsita Sahu (January, 2010).

The favourable location of the community centre, close to several schools and colleges, and its relative seclusion from the city’s prominent thoroughfares, also made the space attractive for clandestine youth retreats. In its heyday, Nirula’s provided the ideal hideout for truanting college and school students, who often used the restrooms to switch from school uniforms into casual clothes to escape occasional raids by school authorities. In contrast to the low-key morning and afternoon shows at regular cinemas, which invariably screened sleazy films for a male audience, Chanakya’s day-time screenings held a special charm and became a distinct youth phenomenon. For these slots, popular Hollywood teenage flicks and Hindi romantic films were screened, with Dirty Dancing (Emile Ardolino, 1987), Abba (Lasse Hallstrom, 1979), Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977), Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978) and Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990) running to full houses.

In addition to the screenings, the hallowed space of the community centre enabled certain kinds of social practices. For instance, audience memoirs speak of distinctive coming-of-age experiences: frequently the author’s first encounter with an English-language film or adult film was at Chanakya (Hindustan Times, 2007). Several memoirs by female cinemagoers also convey the overwhelming sense of emancipation accruing from an unprecedented mobility and access to public space. An anonymous blogger, for example, describes the novelty of being able to ‘hang out’ in public places like Chanakya, which was not the case with the other theatres (Anonymous Blogger, 2007). She carries distinct memories of the films seen during school trips, which formed early associations of safety and familiarity with the theatre:

… The theatre had individuality, it had class. It was one of the few theatres where women did not feel that men had come to watch them, instead of the movie. It was also one of the few theatres where you could spend time and ‘hang out,’ instead of rushing through the movie and heading home.

She then replays a scene from the film Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994), viewed as an adult from the notorious front row, which was, at other regular theatres, usually frequented by low-income male audiences. The technological spectacle and tactile memory of the scene she describes from the film coincides with the transgressive thrill she experienced as a front row spectator. Hollywood, technology and subjectivity intersect to create a distinct horizon of experience crucial to framing the memory of Chanakya.

Apart from safety, the exhilaration attached to cinema going indicates a sense of respite from other more routine, restrictive and secure environments such as home, school, and familial and neighbourhood communities. For example, one cinemagoer, the model Shefali Talwar, speaking to Kazmi, describes her outings to Chanakya as ‘the first taste of freedom’ (Kazmi, 2005, p. 7).

Chanakya also engendered a lively dating culture, as described in the excerpts below. The VJ Gaurav Kapoor told Kazmi:

… For the 90s generation, Chanakya was all about another kind of freedom: ‘chicks’ … A lecture in the morning followed by a flick in the afternoon at the Chanakya with your chick and then a date over some chikkun momos and chowmein—Ah! What more can best define nostalgia.

Another audience response by Aparajita Bajaj is quoted in Hindustan Times (2007).

Considering the vibrant social atmosphere and distinctly transgressive pleasures it offered, Chanakya and the Yashwant Place Community Centre were remembered by many as the site of their induction into youth culture. For instance, one patron states, ‘I had first come to Chanakya to watch “Oliver Twist” on a school trip when I was in class XI in 1974 … Since then, I have never passed by without watching a film here’, (Pushkarna, 2007). Another patron states, ‘I always had to be there to watch every film that was released, it was as simple as that’ (Mehra, 2005), and an article states how audiences ‘trekked across the city to catch this one film…trying to take in the complexities of Sex, Lies and Videotape or simply enjoying blockbusters like Pretty Woman’ (Hindustan Times, 2007).

One of the most vivid and detailed coming-of-age accounts is delivered in an article in the India Today magazine by well-known Indian filmmaker, Rakesh Mehra (Mehra, 2005). Mehra’s anecdotal accounts bring to life the community centre not merely as a coveted destination for films but also as an everyday ‘haunt’ and a habitual site for adolescent explorations. In Mehra’s recollections, Chanakya becomes linked with his first smoking escapade and first adult film-watching experiences with friends; with bunking school and subsequent detentions by authorities; and with memories associated with visits to the theatre with his father in early childhood. Chanakya, in these recollections, appears like an epicentre that connects with other sites and relationships, an alternative space as well as an extension of the family, school, home and the neighbourhood. Chanakya is commemorated in all the memories discussed here as a site that offered otherworldly pleasures, a place for affective inhabitation and experiences. Most importantly, the site emerges as a place where communitarian ties were reinvented, gendered thresholds were crossed and adult supervision was evaded. The story of Chanakya shows how English-language films intersected with a complicated spatial web to create a landscape of immense possibilities. As Mehra says, going to Chanakya was quite simply a ‘way of life’ (ibid.), while another patron states, ‘There is something of Chanakya in all of us’ (Hindustan Times, 2007). Besides some of the vivid flashbacks and more spatial accounts, other statements testify to the temporal dimensions of the theatre’s monumentality. Audiences reflect upon Chanakya’s transgenerational and enduring presence in the city for close to 40 years, and assess personal milestones linked with the site. Ajinder Singh states, ‘After all, I have come here with friends and also when I had a family. It has been a 30-year-long relationship with Chanakya’ (Pushkarna, 2007). Amita recounts how she met her husband in Nirula’s for the first time, and after being engaged frequented the café to get to know him. ‘In olden times it happened like that … Today I’m here with the same guy, my husband of 23 years. I hate to see this place go’ (ibid.). Another article observed the wide age range of the audience gathered at Chanakya during one of its last shows, with ‘strangers smiling at each other, middle-aged men swapping memories with twenty-somethings’ (Gupta, 2008).

This is perhaps why large numbers of people were deeply affected by the demise of Chanakya. Embedded here is the encounter between adult selves and a monument to childhood and youthful pasts. Apart from the discourse of loss generated by earlier generations more directly linked to the theatre, another kind of nostalgia was shared by cyber communities of young bloggers. This was the constant comparison between, on the one hand, the single screen experience that meant cheaper tickets, matinee shows, front row whistling, familiarity with ushers and a sense of informality, and, on the other hand, the sterile environment of multiplexes. With the physical disappearance of the Chanakya theatre, the online forums invested in recuperating the city’s material landscape as an ‘authentic’ past. In doing this, the bloggers seemed to provide a tangible expression to a broader sense of collective anxiety linked to the appearance of generic global sites of urban regeneration. The polarised debate between architectural preservation and urban redevelopment foregrounded Chanakya’s ‘disappearing act’ as a sentient event that brought the city’s residents together to rediscover and claim a history as their own.

Making and Unmaking: Iconoclasm, Disappearance and the Urban Ruin

Chanakya’s demolition gradually festered into a mounting public controversy over the 7 years of protracted court battle between the NDMC and the theatre’s management. The concluding phase, between the High Court verdict in favour of demolition in August 2005 and the eventual shutting down of the theatre on December 31, 2007 following the Supreme Court’s final decree, witnessed a period of palpable public anxiety and active forms of protest in the city. This discontent coincided with a growing unease about the disruptive and erosive redevelopment activities planned ahead of the 2010 Commonwealth Games. ¹⁸ Alongside textual discourses of mourning mounted via online forums and the print media, Chanakya’s demolition acquired a new potency with the emergence, during this time, of a powerful discourse on preservation.

Henri Lefebvre has famously said, ‘Monumentality transcends death, and hence also what is sometimes called the “death instinct’’’ (Lefebvre, 1997, p. 133). With the monument, a conflicted reality is transformed into an appearance. Lefebvre points to the key defining aspect of monumentalism: its wilful desire for transcendence and imperishability across time. It is this tension between a sense of the eternal and the inherent failure of this illusion that makes the monument acquire such a maximising force during its mortality. For the ‘unintended monument’ or a site that gradually acquires meaning for a community, the moment of destruction, alteration or annihilation can become a symbolic act of iconoclasm (Nelson & Olin, 2003, p. 205). Several studies on such monuments have shown how the making and unmaking of a monument is essentially linked to its ‘objecthood’ and therefore any physical act of destruction brings to the fore the materiality of such an entity.

The movement around Chanakya’s preservation gathered intensity in the wake of interventions led by Gita Dewan Verma, an architect and former student of Chanakya’s designer, P. N. Mathur. Dewan initially voiced concern about the demolition in an online architecture forum (Dewan, 2005). Dewan’s posts gathered much support from architects who expressed an urgent need to document the building’s modernist design history for future generations. At the same time, petitions were sent to NDMC, the Department of Archaeology and the President of India. Despite widespread lobbying and opposition, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) rejected the petitions on the technical grounds that the Chanakya building had not existed for 75 years and therefore did not meet the minimum criteria for consideration for heritage status (The Hindu, November 20, 2005). Senior conservationist A. G. K. Menon tellingly lamented, ‘Unfortunately, we do not have any system for recognising modern architecture in the country and it is a tough battle to fight for heritage’ (ibid.). Menon’s statement reveals the ironies inherent in contemporary systems of preservation, whose emphasis on age reveals a fossilised relationship with the past. As cities obsess about memory accruing from a felt crisis, especially with memory-less sites of global capitalism increasingly taking over spaces, the past has become commercially fabricated through picturesque sites of preservation. Christine Boyer describes these methods of mythical placemaking as a form of ‘nostalgia market’, wherein the distant and remote past becomes suitable for manipulation into superficial displays and entertainment (Boyer, 2001, p. 449). It is no wonder, therefore, that those making the decisions about Chanakyapuri neighbourhood’s memorials—memorials which announced the nation’s independence and sovereignty—found the extension of these into a world-class mall-multiplex to be a mark of progress. ¹⁹

Although both the architects’ movement and the ASI’s rejection stemmed from a similar authoritarian disposition and pedagogically controlled approach that established the professional as the only preservationist, the discourse on Chanakya’s physical properties heightened the visceral cognisance and spectacle of its destruction (refer Vohra, 2003). This resulted in more organised forms of protest. For instance, an online campaign was initiated by Dewan through the website, www.savechanakya.com (Dewan, 2007). This website aimed to bring together ‘the voice of the common man along with experts on architecture’ to form a larger collective of the ‘People for Chanakya’ (ibid.). The campaign urged for ‘gandhigiri’ or grassroots activism through street processions of solidarity and candlelight vigils. While the candlelight vigil saw a sizeable participation of protesters, other symbolic forms of dissent claiming the Chanakya controversy as a political issue were also staged by Chanakya’s ageing employees and long-term staff at the Jantar Mantar, a medieval-period monument in central Delhi that has become the site of protest, sit-ins and sloganeering. These forms of public dissent, widely reported by the media, lent a city-wide resonance to the Chanakya movement. The commemorative acts also served as symbolic gestures through which to prolong the theatre’s official end and provide it with an afterlife. The last few weeks before the theatre finally shut down witnessed a surge of visitors and audiences. At the same time, an outpouring of media reports created an epic tone through headlines such as ‘End of an Era’ (Kazmi, 2005), ‘Chanakyapuri stays, but Chanakya to go’ (The Sunday Express, 2007), ‘Chanakya theatre: Old is not Gold’ (Mid-Day, 2007), ‘Nostalgia rules as it’s curtains for Chanakya’ (Pushkarna, 2007), ‘Last Day Last Show, Adios Chanakya. We will miss you!’ (The Indian Express, 2007) and in a Hindi newspaper, ‘Chanakya, Tumko Na Bhool Payenge,’ that is, ‘Chanakya, we shall not forget you’ (Sandhya Times, 2005).

Chanakya’s end might not have become such an iconic event had it not been for the contestations and memorial practices that imparted an iconoclastic monumentality to its demolition. Indeed, had Chanakya been granted heritage status, it may not have captured the city’s imagination in such a forceful manner. This monumentality is evident even from some of the intuitive and powerful image-making practices that surfaced after the theatre closed down. A symbolic image of the urban ruin, for example, was captured by well-known photographer Ram Rahman in a stunning long shot of the building midway through its demolition (Figure 5) (Rahman, 2010). Rahman’s photograph juxtaposes both the ruin and the rubble, indicating not abandonment but desecration. Consonant with the wider genre and aesthetics of ruin photography, the building appears sublime, proud and imposing with its pristine concrete façade set against a greyish sky, with gaping holes, rubble and shrouding trees poignantly indicating its imminent return to nature. A foil to the monument and architecture of the recent past, ruination fractures deceptive surfaces of the object to uncover the destroyed utopian forces buried within. Thus, Rahman’s ruin-image lays bare Chanakya’s architectural hubris, particularly the ironies of its modernist lineage, a school most heavily invested in the ideology of development through an anti-preservationist functionalism.

For Walter Benjamin, the notion of ruin could serve as a potent allegorical form in the present that could truly help us to understand the past. The desecrated ruin, both eerie, shocking, forlorn and a counter monument for the devalued and destroyed, blasts history’s forward gaze. In its catastrophic setting, the present is awakened and stalled, as the past, no longer a distant abstraction but a force arising from the ‘now’, suddenly collides with it, and then ‘flits by’, like a flash of lightning. It is important to seize this fleeting moment before it disappears again, argues Benjamin (1969, p. 255). This dialectical image of collision between the past and present was captured in blogger and journalist Mayank Austen Soofi’s highly evocative series of photomontages (Figures 6–12) (Soofi, 2010). If the first figure in Soofi’s series of before and after images powerfully projects the shocks of urban transformation (Figure 6), the other images render the familiar mysterious and melancholic. Figures 7–12 present eroded posters, empty passages, the closed gate and the once iconic monograms now symbolic of the forsaken. Strikingly ordinary, and framed in a manner to appear almost subjectless, these fragments of the everyday visual world depict that which does not enter conscious perception so much as become part of our intimate bodily inhabitations. In giving voice to the contingent truths of photography, these images serve as mnemonic devices and ephemeral stimuli that open out dormant memories, even as the theatre site disappears from our visible and conscious realms forever.

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Figure 5.

Photo Courtesy: Ram Rahman (2009)

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Figure 6(1).

Photo Courtesy: Mayank Austen Soofi (2009)

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Figure 6(2).

Photo Courtesy: Mayank Austen Soofi (2009)

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Figure 7.

Photo Courtesy: Mayank Austen Soofi (2009)

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Figure 8.

Photo Courtesy: Mayank Austen Soofi (2009)

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Figure 9.

Photo Courtesy: Mayank Austen Soofi.

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Figure 10.

Photo Courtesy: Mayank Austen Soofi (2009)

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Figure 11.

Photo Courtesy: Mayank Austen Soofi (2009)

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Figure 12.

Photo Courtesy: Mayank Austen Soofi (2009)