Interior designer Sunita Kohli has a long list of coups to her name "" she's probably the only Indian architect who can boast of having redone Rashtrapati Bhavan, Hyderabad House, Bhutan House, and some of the best-known offices in North and South Block. It is hardly surprising that in the course of her work, she became something of a zealot on the subject of Sir Edwin Lutyens. Pronounced 'Lutch-yens', actually, she offers sweetly, Not many people know this, but he had a strong Dutch ancestry.
Kohli was horrified to discover, then, that the country in which Lutyens did some of his best work has very few records of his work. This year, she plans to remedy that through an ambitious project called the Lutyens Trust. The core of the project is the creation of archives which will contain facsimiles of original blueprints, the Country Life series of articles on the great man, and definitive documentation of all his Indian works.
The ubiquitous bungalows of Delhi, however, will not be included. The design he had suggested was not accepted because it would have been too expensive to construct, says Lutyens foremost acolyte, the present bungalows are not at all what he had conceived.
The Lutyens Trust is one-fourth of an even larger project, which brings together the likes of O P Jain and Roula Shriram in individual projects that aim to restore the capital city to some of its former glory.
Before the work on the Lutyens Trust really gets going, however, Kohli has a minor problem on her hands. Last week, she had just completed renovating the foreign minister's office "" all that was left was to add a few finishing touches, such as the planters that were flown in from Madras. The lady left for Hong Kong, and returned to find that the incumbent had switched posts in her absence. But the planters have to be shifted in anyway "" Mr Inder Kumar Gujral may have taken up residence in the Prime Minister's Office, but he still visits his old office occasionally in his capacity as India's foreign minister.
