Rational Recreation: Regulating the historic gardens of Old Delhi 1912-1940s

Abstract

Public gardens, in colonial imagination, were conceived as an ordered, moral and sanitised space for pursuing leisure. This study explores the imperial ideologies and notions of respectability, shared by the Indian upper classes, in delineating the contours of rational recreation. The paper argues that the regulation of leisure in public gardens was a soft face of civilising impulse and a subtle form of disciplinary strategy employed by the colonial state to inculcate codes of public conduct and discipline amongst the population of Delhi. This paper also examines the lived realities and the challenges that people posed to ideas of rational recreation. The notions of morality in public space were flouted by the presence and activities of those who were regarded as ‘Budmashes’; the sanitised space was fouled by the sewage, waste, and ‘smell’ of poor visitors; and the notion of public space as a regulated arena was questioned by the many ways in which the colonised occupied the public gardens.