Delhi is exceptionally skilled at remembering buildings after making them impossible to inhabit. We install a plaque, misplace the archive, approve something reflective nearby and congratulate ourselves on respecting history. Sujan Singh Park, one of New Delhi’s early private apartment complexes and once home to writers, artists, officials and working families, now sits inside an argument about its future.
An Indian Express Sunday Eye feature recently revisited the neighbourhood’s cultural life and uncertainty. The familiar names make the story attractive—Khushwant Singh supplies instant anecdote—but celebrity should not be the price of preservation. The real significance lies in a residential form and social world that modern Delhi is remarkably good at erasing.
A city is more than its monuments
Delhi protects grand tombs, imperial avenues and official buildings more readily than everyday architecture. Yet people experience a city through staircases, courtyards, shops, trees, neighbours and routes repeated over decades. An apartment complex can hold as much urban memory as a ceremonial structure, even if nobody bought a ticket to enter it.
Sujan Singh Park represents a particular stage in New Delhi’s evolution: collective urban living with proportions, materials and shared spaces from another planning era. Its value is not that every wall must remain untouched. It is that the ensemble tells us how residents inhabited the capital before land values turned every low-rise plot into an accusation of inefficiency.
Developers and planners use “underutilised” as though land had only one function: maximising saleable floor area. By that definition, trees underutilise sunlight and old residents underutilise profitable locations. The language is economically tidy and socially illiterate.
Preservation cannot mean freezing hardship
Heritage advocates can be equally sentimental. Age does not repair plumbing. Residents need safe structures, accessibility, fire systems, modern services and legal clarity. A preservation order that prevents essential upgrades while offering no funding merely transfers the cost of public memory onto private occupants.
The right approach begins with documentation and structural assessment, not slogans. Identify the elements that give the complex significance: massing, landscape, façades, internal streets, common areas and particular interiors where relevant. Then design rules that allow adaptation. Heritage buildings survive when they remain useful.
Financial mechanisms matter. Transferable development rights, maintenance grants, tax relief and carefully designed adaptive reuse can compensate owners for restrictions imposed in the public interest. Without such tools, preservation becomes a moral lecture delivered by people who do not pay the repair bill.
The Khushwant Singh problem
Attaching heritage to a famous resident helps journalists and campaigners. It also narrows our imagination. We begin protecting only houses that can boast a writer, prime minister or film star. The ordinary fabric between them disappears, leaving isolated memorial objects in a city stripped of context.
Khushwant Singh’s association should draw attention to Sujan Singh Park, not define its entire worth. The domestic staff, shopkeepers, children, tenants and less celebrated residents also made the neighbourhood. Their memories belong in any archive or exhibition. Oral history should not become another drawing room guest list.
Delhi’s official heritage agencies and municipal bodies need a transparent inventory process that permits residents and researchers to nominate twentieth-century sites before redevelopment applications arrive. Waiting until demolition becomes imminent ensures every case turns into litigation and outrage.
Density is a real argument
I can hear the objection: Delhi faces a housing crisis, and preserving low-rise enclaves in central locations entrenches privilege. This deserves more than a romantic answer. Cities must add housing near jobs and transit. Heritage cannot become a blanket veto wielded by wealthy residents who enjoy spacious compounds while everyone else commutes two hours.
But demolition does not automatically produce affordability. High-value central redevelopment often yields luxury housing, not homes for nurses, clerks or service workers. If density is the public justification, policy should require public benefit: affordable units, rental housing, accessible open space and infrastructure contributions. Otherwise “housing supply” becomes decorative language for replacing expensive homes with more expensive homes.
Selective, well-designed infill may sometimes add units while preserving the ensemble. That requires architects rather than spreadsheet extrusion. It also requires public review capable of distinguishing heritage from mere resistance to change.
Memory needs records
Whatever happens physically, documentation should begin now. Architectural drawings, photographs, resident interviews, tenancy histories, landscape surveys and accounts of cultural life belong in accessible archives. Too much of Indian urban history remains in private albums until a family clears a cupboard.
Universities could partner with residents and civic bodies. Students would gain a real site for studying housing, conservation and oral history. The public would gain something better than a nostalgic coffee-table book published after alteration is irreversible.
I would also like walking tours and small exhibitions that do not turn the complex into a theme park. Cultural visibility can build support, but residents are not exhibits. The balance is manageable if organisers ask permission and share benefits.
What this one neighbourhood asks
Sujan Singh Park matters because the argument is happening across Indian cities. Post-independence campuses, markets, cinemas, industrial structures and housing colonies are aging into vulnerability. They are too recent to feel ancient and too old to satisfy current real-estate arithmetic.
We need a vocabulary between total demolition and museum preservation. Adaptation, retrofitting, infill, easements and conservation management are less thrilling than protest banners, but they are how living heritage survives.
Delhi often behaves as if history ended in 1947 and development began the next morning. The decades after independence produced their own architecture, communities and experiments. Losing them would leave future citizens with an oddly edited capital: emperors, colonial rulers and glass towers, with ordinary twentieth-century life removed from the timeline.
I am not asking that every brick at Sujan Singh Park receive constitutional protection. I am asking the city to prove it can value something before it becomes a ruin or a memory. That should be a low bar. Delhi, with characteristic confidence, continues to trip over it.
