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By Kajal Basu
Photographs by Pradeep Saha
 A
photographic tribute to the architectural wonder of Maharaja Jai Singh II's Jantar
Mantar
At the heart of the center of the architectural cul-de-sac
called New Delhi, you will find an escape route if you want one, an oasis of no-frills,
mathematical masonry, a ladder to the stars. The design of the Jantar Mantar,
built in 1724 by Jaipur's Maharaja Jai Singh II, has more to it than just its
function as an astronomical observatory it is architecture at its finest, backed
by a minimalist philosophy that came into its own only in the early decades of
this century: minus its historical pedigree, the Jantar Mantar could well have
been designed by Germany's Bauhaus School.
Astronomy is all about the
gigantic, millennial interplay of Time and Space. The Jantar Mantar is like a
witness stand to the over-arching beauty of the universe; the world's largest
walk-through sundial, the Samrat Yantra, is in keeping with its purpose (a small
sextant would have served just as well, but.). This is gigantism with a transcendental
face, born of a spirit as ambitious and engulfing as the sky itself. |
 Notwithstanding
its dismaying slapdash pinkification (on the lines of the Pink City, Jaipur) by
the Archaeological Survey of India, the Jantar Mantar's soul is in clear-cut black
and white, light and shade, with no room for the whimsical imprecision perfected
by artists as one of their many expressions of creativity. The complex, with its
clean angles and unwavering curves, has the stern beauty of a nun. Embellishments
like gargoyles and carved colonnades and vertiginously swooping arches have no
place in its scheme of things. There is a stark, glacial spiritualism here, given
life not just by a king's transcendental idea translated into a blueprint by a
court architect and slapped into life and shape by a contractor and his legion
of masons, but by a solar-centric view of creation. Maharaja Jai Singh, it is
said, was so addicted to looking at his realm and reign by the flickering, icy
light of the stars that he forgot how to focus on anything as bright and close
as his own nose.
He would obviously never have anticipated that, two
centuries later, his observatory would become the observed. The gateway to the
stars would be squashed under the weight of gross buildings that hem it in today,
its line of sight blocked by a blanket of pollution of both earth and spirit.
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Life Positive, February
1997
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