How British-era Gole Market became a New Delhi icon

Gole Market is gole. Truly round. An octagonal building is the sun in its solar system. This central edifice has a grimy tin roof but is historic — it was a part of Edwin Lutyen’s design for New Delhi. The building is surrounded by a traffic roundabout, which is surrounded by a circle of colonnaded markets.

Closed about a decade ago, following “structural damage” and legal disputes, the barricaded landmark is to be relaunched into a fresh lease of life.

New plans were announced by the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) on June 28. It is to become a museum.

Just before it went into purdah some years ago, the building looked like a severely derelict version of what it must have been originally when it came up in 1921.

Also Read: British-era Gole Market, which predates New Delhi, set to become a museum

Stepping into the place was like entering a ruin. The interiors had lamp posts without lamps, the ground was littered with animal offal — the building still had a few meat and fish shops, as well as a couple of eating places with names like Sagar and Galina. Mangy dogs were everywhere.

The building has remained long out of view, but the colonnade about the traffic roundabout that overlooks the barricaded structure is alive with its showrooms, mithai shops, hair-cutting salons, chai stalls, and many peepal trees. In fact, the corridor and its white columns look like a toy replica of Connaught Place, nearby, which came up much later. Some of the shops here have become history.

The person manning the Saraswati Book Depot was like a character in Satyajit Ray’s Feluda mysteries.

All day long he sat in the interiors of the dimly lit store, crammed with Bengali-language books and journals.

Dressed in a white kurta pyjama, he would frequently lament the dwindling strength of the “Gole Market Bengalis.”

Developed by the British, Gole Market area had senior government officials as its earliest occupants.

Many happened to be Bengalis. (The locality though is rich in diversity. Karachi Halwa House, for instance, belongs to a family that migrated from Sindh almost a decade before the Partition.)

A much-missed icon in the arcade outside the round building is the Nirulas restaurant, which shut down permanently during the coronavirus-triggered first lockdown.

One afternoon, long before the pandemic, two ladies at the corner table were gupshuping over a pizza dripping with extra cheese, while a turbaned customer was busy with paneer makhani. The restaurant’s glass door was plastered with a poster of hot chocolate fudge. Today, the glass door is missing but the entrance is blocked by what appears to be a wooden cot. Inside, darkness, dust, and shattered glasses.

In some sense, Gole Market is already a museum. Its past is literally embedded in its concrete. The series of arches lining the colonnade are engraved with signages that indicate its early life. One arch is marked “poultry and fish.” Another is marked “wine merchants and general stores,” and two others are in Urdu—“doodh, makhan aur roti godam,” and “bakre ka gosht.”

The forthcoming museum must value these signages as Gole Market’s very own Rosetta Stone. They contain clues to its early days.

Their preciousness transcends this small market, being symbols of constancy in our drastically altering megapolis.