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by phileasfogg
New Delhi, India
December 1, 2008
Back in the first year of World War I, an Indian eye surgeon called Dr Sorabji P Shroff (a graduate of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh) decided he wanted to do something to help the poor of Delhi: he wanted to establish an eye clinic, a charitable one at that. Eight years later, Shroff, along with some of Delhi’s most prominent citizens (a number of them statesmen and politicians such as M A Ansari and Hakim Ajmal Khan) set up a trust for the proposed clinic. They petitioned the government, and kept at it, for the next two years. In 1924, the Delhi administration finally approved the grant of a piece of land for the building of the hospital. In the heart of Daryaganj (what is now known as Kedarnath Road), the Shroff Charity Eye Hospital was completed in 1927 and was inaugurated by Lady Irwin, the wife of the then Viceroy of India.
We didn’t get a chance to go into the hospital building—very early on a cold Sunday morning isn’t the best time to visit—but even seen from between the bars of the main gate, this is a very fine colonial building. It’s painted a rich brick red, with the arches, windows, columns and fitted stones along the edges picked out in a pleasing cream. The centre of the building is a sort of portico; on either side of this stretch the two main wings of the hospital, double-storied and punctuated on both floors by a series of semi-circular arches. The semi-circular arch, by the way, is typical of colonial architecture in Delhi: the other two common types of arches—the pointed, which was used from the Sultanate period on; and the cusped Shahjahani arch—are both of much earlier origin. On the ground floor of the Shroff Charity Eye Hospital, the columns are walled up till just about where the arch begins; on the first floor, instead of a brick wall, there are glass panes that help accentuate the simplicity of the architecture. The gardens in front of the hospital building complement it perfectly: there’s a lawn, low hedges, and frangipani trees covered with deep green sword-shaped leaves and bunches of fragrant white flowers.
Visitors, as long as they’re quiet and discreet, are allowed in, since this is after all a hospital. It goes without saying that you won’t be permitted to visit every part of the building. Even if you don’t enter the gates, though, you can get a good view of this amazing colonial monument from the outside.
From journal Daryaganj: Exploring Mughal and Colonial Delhi