All the President’s books

In 1930s and 1940s British India, the buffet table at traditional gala dinners at the Viceregal Lodge in Shimla had a regular item on the menu – a dish called Boef Hanuman (boef, or boeuf is the French word for meat of any domestic bovine animal, including the cow). It sounds fantastic given our recent fractious politics over beef and beef-eating, but no one – and there must have been many Hindus and Muslims among the Viceroy’s guests, some of them nationalist politicians of the day – raised a shindy over the purported affront to Indian religious sensibilities.

It was an Englishman, Peter Coats, comptroller of the household during Lord Wavell’s tenure as viceroy, who realised what a social gaffe it was and made provisions for separate buffets, one for Hindus and one for Muslims. To his delight, however, one guest, a member of the Congress, came up and asked whether he could eat from both!

These, and other anecdotes – fascinating and redolent of gentler, more civilised times – pepper the pages of an upcoming book, Around India’s First Table: Dining and Entertaining at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, due to be released at the Rashtrapati Bhavan on July 25. Written by British academic Elizabeth Collingham, Around... traces the evolution of Rashtrapati Bhavan’s food and hospitality traditions from “the days when British viceroys served French food” through the post-independence era when all things British were gradually replaced with Indian, to now, when the presidential abode is at the centre of India’s gastronomic diplomacy, evidence of a confident country eager to showcase its many varied flavours and cuisines.

Collingham’s book is not the only one coming out that day. There’ll be four more books on various aspects of Rashtrapati Bhavan. The First Garden of the Republic: Nature on the President’s Estate, edited by economist and cultural anthropologist Amita Baviskar. While the Mughal Gardens at Rashtrapati Bhavan, with its elaborate and careful profusion of colour is well known, few know that the 350-acre estate adjacent to the scrub forests of Delhi Ridge is rich in biodiversity and is home to 111 of the 440 bird species found in Delhi.

Then there’s a book on its architecture and landscape, A Work of Beauty, edited by historian Narayani Gupta and another on a similar subject called The Arts and Interiors of Rashtrapati Bhavan: Lutyens and Beyond, edited by art historians Partha Mitter and Naman P Ahuja.

There’s also a children’s book, Discover the Magnificent World of Rashtrapati Bhavan by Subhadra Sengupta.

Later in December three more books will be released. Notable among these is Life at Rashtrapati Bhavan, edited by Sudha Gopalakrishnan and Yashaswini Chandra. It will, in Chandra’s words, bring alive the “very complex and complicated life” of the around 8,000 people who count Rashtrapati Bhavan their home, who maintain its one-and-a-half miles of corridors, its 340 rooms, 35 loggias, besides the two army contingents who guard the president.

“Many of them have lived there over generations, the sons taking over from the fathers,” adds Gopalakrishnan, executive director of Sahapedia, the online resource platform on the art, culture and heritage of India, which is putting together these books.

It’s a “self-contained world in the lap of nature”, she says, complete with its own post office and bank, school, market, cricket ground, golf course, tennis courts, swimming pool, and even a steam bath. “Life... will not be a sterile account of Rashtrapati Bhavan as a building, but an inhabited estate and its history through the ages,” promises Chandra.   

Besides these, Sahapedia has already brought out two more books in the series – Right of the Line: The President’s Bodyguard (July 2015), edited by military historian Rana TS Chhina and Yashaswini Chandra, and The Presidential Retreats of India (March 2016), edited by Gillian Wright.

There are 11 in Sahapedia’s Rashtrapati series – two editions of Indradhanush, documenting the cultural performances by eminent singers, dancers, screenings and plays held on the estate during the tenure of the present incumbent, Pranab Mukherjee. One of these was published in May and the other comes out in December this year, along with the second children’s book on the president’s house.

Well designed and crisply edited coffee ‘tablers’ with lots of photographs, these are handsome books that are a far cry from the staid and poorly printed government publications. Besides the editors, known scholars and experts, many other well-regarded specialists have been roped in to contribute – among them naturalist Pradip Krishen, heritage experts AGK Menon and Monisha Ahmed and photographers Ram Rahman, Avinash Pasricha and Dinesh Khanna.

Commissioned by the President’s Secretariat, the government sector Publications Division has also brought out the Sahapedia books. It has already done three volumes of speeches by the president, a tome on the Winged Wonders of Rashtrapati Bhavan (2014) and a book on the state guests who came to India between 1947 and 1967 called Abode Under the Dome (2015).

Perhaps, speculates Collingham, this was the reason it is so hard to find relevant material at the India Office Records. “They seem to have thrown much of the information away. Perhaps they did not want to keep on record the vast amounts of money they spent on this new capital, only to surrender it to an independent India less than twenty years later,” she says.

For most of its life, thus, and for all its British exterior, Rashtrapati Bhavan has been a landmark of independent India’s history. This was also, as Chandra reminds, where our eventual freedom from the British was negotiated.

“It is history.”

Strangely, prior to this, there had not been too many attempts to document its history. Chandra, who has worked on the project for three years now, feels that while “Mukherjee has really made an effort to document it, to conserve it and create public access to it – ‘demystify Rashtrapati Bhavan’ as he calls it.”

Writing the introduction to Collingham’s book, Omita Paul, the president’s secretary, says the Rashtrapati Bhavan is a “living heritage” and that there was need for “documenting the various inter-related aspects of the Rashtrapati Bhavan into a seamlessly interwoven series of books for posterity”.

Posterity will be grateful.

Also read: A Q&A with Elizabeth Collingham, author of "Around India’s First Table: Dining and Entertaining at the Rashtrapati Bhavan"