Delhiwale: Tiles in a subway

Taak, a niche on the wall, is a disappearing element of Delhi’s architecture. Maybe because suburban flats no longer have walls thick enough to afford taak.

But here’s a taak, set deep into a wall. Well, it actually is a two-dimensional representation of the traditional niche, consisting entirely of tiles. For that matter, virtually the entire pedestrian passage it is to be found in is adorned with tiles.

This is a small underground tunnel in South Delhi, running under the traffic-heavy Outer Ring Road and connecting SDA Market to IIT Delhi. This afternoon, it is empty, filling one with uncertainty about the aesthetic merits of its tapestry of tiles. Is it beautiful or not? The dilemma quickly gets entangled with the complicated place of tiles in Delhi’s present and past architecture. Many of our municipality toilets are of common ceramic tiles. Similar tiles adorn a mystic’s roadside grave on Zakir Husain Marg—the shrine is possibly several centuries old, and the modern tiles crudely disrupt its historic character.

That said, a handful of city monuments boast tiles as an essential aspect of their primal elegance. And these tiles tend to be glazed. In the distant past, during the process of glazing, a layer of pigmented ingredients—made of plant-ash flux or mineral-soda flux—would be applied to tiles of sand-and-silica or terracotta. On being baked in limited batches in small clay-fired kilns, they produced the colours they still emit today. This is for instance the case with the tiles on the 16th century-Sabz Burj, on Mathura Road. During a conservation project undertaken on the monument by Aga Khan Trust for Culture, its original tiles were left untouched, including those that had lost their glaze, but the missing portions were decked with new glazed tiles. These were handmade by craftspeople, especially trained by a team of Uzbekistan artisans, for this method of making tiles was lost in India. In fact some of the world’s most sophisticated artistry of tiles is found in the palaces and tombs of Iran, embellished with mosaics of intricate patterns.

The tile work in this subway is not of the stature of Tehran’s Golestan Palace, but it summons the beauty that tiles are capable of.

The subway appears to lack a plaque to inform about the artist or artists behind the tile-work. Exploring the various depictions on the subway walls, however, quickly reveal that the tiles here have probably tried to recreate the impressions of a Delhi monument that never had tiles, the Jantar Mantar.