The events of 1857 inspired a slew of novels. The two most famous among them—The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell (1973) and A Flight of Pigeons by Ruskin Bond (1980)—are both modern and their action is not set in Delhi. For a more contemporary and Delhi-based perspective we must turn to a near-forgotten masterpiece of the genre, On the Face of the Waters by Flora Annie Steel (1896). Steel’s story elaborates one of the many Mutiny myths, about an Englishman who reportedly lived in disguise within the city throughout the three months of the siege. Her manner of telling it unsettled some of her compatriots because she candidly depicts the contemptuous attitudes of many Britons in India that were among the uprising’s causes. Another Mutiny myth—that Englishwomen were raped by sepoys—was widely believed long after it was officially discredited. Fear of rape became part of the British psyche in India and resurfaced in other novels including, most famously, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1929).
Feelings ran just as deep on the Indian side. Renaming the episode as the First War of Independence links it retrospectively to the heroism and sacrifice of the freedom struggle of the twentieth century. Official accounts even of the peaceful movement of Mahatma Gandhi are often prefaced by descriptions of British unfairness and cruelty back in 1857. And the monuments have been reinscribed. Literally so, in the case of the Mutiny Memorial—a Gothic commemorative spire erected by the British on the ridge, whose original inscription speaks of the number of ‘enemy’ killed—where a second inscription added after Independence points out that this refers to patriotic Indians who laid down their lives. Back down on the plain, Kashmiri Gate still stands but its role in history has been overwritten as its name has been reassigned to the nearby bus terminal.
The Mutiny Memorial; photograph by Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II, c. 1870
Starting Anew: The British
The British were late converts to the merits of Delhi as a capital. A maritime trading nation, for a long time they preferred to maintain the port city of Calcutta as their capital. For more than a hundred years after their capture of Delhi in 1803, it continued to have, in their eyes, the status of a provincial city. Before 1857 it was less important than Agra, which served as the headquarters of the North-West Provinces and was the seat of the lieutenant governor. After 1857, Delhi came under the jurisdiction of the Punjab. But slowly, and despite the trauma of 1857, the historical and geographical advantages of Delhi began to lure reluctant Britons to its cause.
The process began in 1877, when, on the suggestion of the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria was declared empress of India. A grand ceremony was planned at which the new empress was represented by Viceroy Lord Lytton. Since the British were now assuming the imperial mantle, at last replacing the lately defunct Mughals, it seemed appropriate to conduct this ceremony on the Mughals’ home turf—Delhi—rather than in the capital at Calcutta. The site selected was the cantonment to the north of the ridge. An ‘Imperial Assemblage’ of maharajas, nawabs and other representatives of the Indian people gathered together to proclaim the official inauguration of an empire that had already existed de facto for over a century.
In 1903 the operation was repeated to proclaim Edward VII as the new king-emperor. The Delhi Durbar of that year was staged by Lord Curzon on the same site and on an even grander scale. The vast tented encampment even had its own temporary railway line. Finally, in December 1911, a third Delhi Durbar was staged, and this time the new monarch, King George V, and his consort, Queen Mary, came in person to receive homage and to be crowned as emperor and empress.
The Imperial Assemblage, Delhi; photograph by Bourne & Shepherd,1877
In his speech on that occasion, George V announced that for ‘the better administration of India and the greater prosperity and happiness of Our People’ it had been decided to transfer the seat of government from Calcutta to ‘the ancient Capital of Delhi’. No previous warning had been given of this announcement, and the decision had been a carefully guarded secret. The king did not elaborate on the reasons, leaving it to the people themselves to work out how it was going to make them happier and more prosperous. Some were ungrateful enough to raise doubts.
The actual if not stated reasoning went back to the disastrous partition of Bengal in 1905 by Lord Curzon, one of the last acts of his controversial viceroyalty. This was a deeply unpopular move in Bengal and led the Indian National Congress (already twenty years old) to admit the idea of constitutional change as a fit topic for discussion. It marked, in short, the coming of age of Indian political nationalism. The British had resolved to reverse the partition, but the reunification was to be coupled with the transfer of the capital so as to save face, to give the king something new and positive rather than apologetic to announce in his speech.
The 1911 Delhi Durbar: the procession passes the Jami Masjid; unknown photographer, 1911
Some commentators touted the supposed climatic advantages of Delhi over Calcutta. The insufferable Bengal summer caused the entire administration to decamp to Simla for more than half the year. But the transfer to Delhi did not lift the need for this annual migration. As the climate was marginally better, the period in Simla could be reduced from seven months to five; and the journey was shorter. But it was really the political climate of Bengal that the British sought to escape by the move to Delhi. They hoped that compliant Delhiites would provide a more congenial atmosphere than truculent Bengalis in which to carry on the work of the empire.
King George V and Queen Mary on the ramparts of the Red Fort with Indian princes as pages; postcard issued by J. Beagles & Co., in commemoration of the 1911 Delhi Durbar
That Delhi’s historical associations were also found attractive is revealed by the king’s description of it as ‘the ancient capital’. The move in large part was about reshaping the empire, presenting it with a fresh face that would appear more Indian. The domed pavilions and other trappings of the three Delhi Durbars had all been constructed in a quasi-Mughal style. King George and Queen Mary sat on thrones on the ramparts of the Red Fort to present themselves to the watching crowds, and were attended by young Indian princes serving as pages. The decision to inhabit and rebuild Delhi as the capital carried forward the process of refashioning the British Empire in India in a local style. There are not many moments in history when the British took major decisions with such a large aesthetic component. But by the early twentieth century, against a rising tide of Indian nationalism, Palladian Calcutta looked just too foreign, and its location spoke too loudly of trade, of the commercial and opportunistic origins of British rule. To rule as emperors required a recognized emperor’s seat, and this Delhi provided.
If the move was intended as some sort of gesture of appeasement to Indian sentiment, then the political symbolism was evidently lost on at least some residents of Delhi. A year after the king’s speech, Lord Hardinge, the viceroy, made a triumphal entry into the city on the back of an enormous elephant. As he turned the corner into Chandni Chowk—the main thoroughfare of the walled city—someone threw a bomb at him. Hardinge was badly injured. His wife, sitting next to him, was miraculously unscathed. But the poor Indian mace bearer, standing behind them, was blown to pieces.
Undeterred, Hardinge persisted in his vision of a truly Indian capital, demanding that the principal buildings themselves should be designed in an Indian style. The idea did not come out of nowhere. In various Indian cities since the 1870s, British architects and engineers had been experimenting with revivals of India’s historical styles of architecture, creating a new hybrid that was often dubbed ‘Indo-Saracenic’. Hardinge, along with many other prominent political figures including the king, thought that adopting an Indo-Saracenic approach in the new capital would convey the essentially Indian character of the British Raj to the Indian public.
Edwin Lutyens, the architect appointed to design the new Viceroy’s House, was appalled at the suggestion. In a letter to his wife, he wrote, in apparent exasperation, ‘God did not make the Eastern rainbow po
inted, to show his wide sympathies!’ What this implies is that for Lutyens the form of the Western classical arch, like that of the rainbow, was natural if not ordained, and you couldn’t mess around with it just to show how nice and accommodating you are. He doesn’t spell out exactly what prompted this outburst but one can well imagine Hardinge taking him aside and saying something along the lines of, ‘My dear fellow, I well understand that you are committed to round arches and that they are frightfully classical and all, but you may have noticed that around here they tend to have pointy tops, and there are some people—and I have to tell you His Majesty agrees with them—who think we ought to do them like that too, so that the Indians don’t see us as alien.’ However he actually expressed it, there is a remarkable historical resonance here. Seven hundred years earlier, Qutb-ud-din Aibak had taken his Indian masons aside and explained that he wanted a screen of pointed arches along the western side of his mosque. His intention was to make the building look less Indian, more foreign. And now, seven hundred years later, another prelate was giving the same instruction for the opposite purpose. The meaning of a symbol can change. The pointed arch was now proposed as a means to proclaim the alien ruler’s Indian identity.
In the event, Lutyens managed to avoid the pointed arch, though not all Indian forms. And there were other things that Hardinge said that equally dismayed him. Impatient to know whether the works could be completed within his own term in office, Hardinge asked him what the buildings would look like in three years’ time. Reporting this in another private letter home, Lutyens protested, ‘300 is what I think of . . . This is building an Imperial City!’ For him, the project was on a par with the Roman Forum. And it followed that the Western classical style was the only fitting way of building it. He felt Indian architecture offered him no suitable models for imitation, and he dismissed it all as ‘veneered joinery’. What was required, he insisted, was ‘logic, and not the mad riot of the tom-tom’.
His partner on the project, Herbert Baker, had worked for many years on the government buildings in Pretoria and was similarly a committed classicist, who was sceptical of the usefulness of ‘the primitive and charming methods’ of Indian architecture. But their scruples were overwhelmed by the most extraordinary public debate. It wasn’t just the viceroy making a suggestion. Politicians in both Britain and India, architects, arts experts, connoisseurs and leader–writers argued the merits of the various possible approaches. On one side of the argument, some claimed that the British should tread in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and take European civilization to Asia. Others retorted that their first commitment should be to India and its own traditions. Passionate speeches were delivered in Parliament. Public meetings were held to discuss the virtues of Indian craftsmanship. Petitions signed by eminent authors were published in the press. At no other point in history have the English people been so obsessed with matters of architecture. Lutyens’s frequent caustic comments on all this unlooked-for advice—‘no one in India knows any kind of craftsmanship except accountancy’—merely fanned the flames.
On the sidelines of this debate, two dissenting arguments went almost unheard. The first, led by Lord Curzon, insisted that transferring the capital was a terrible idea in the first place and should be scrapped. Curzon correctly predicted that it would take far longer and cost far more than planned. He also perhaps saw that the Victoria Memorial Hall in Calcutta, which he himself had commissioned, to serve not just as a monument to the late empress but as a symbol of the empire, would soon be overshadowed and rendered provincial. The second argument, promoted by the arts educator and polemicist E.B. Havell, was that the buildings of New Delhi should not just be in an Indian style; they should be designed by Indian architects. If the idea is to give the place an Indian character, he said, let the Indians make it themselves. In the face of the official government riposte to this proposal—that no Indian architect was competent to carry out the work—a flurry of research was undertaken to demonstrate the viability of the idea, but no one in government ever took it seriously.
So it came down to an argument, not about agency but about style. And if a debate about architectural style seems not to be a typically British thing, the outcome was more obviously so: it was a compromise. The Viceroy’s House and the All-India War Memorial (or India Gate) designed by Lutyens, and the twin Secretariats and the Council House (or Parliament building) designed by Baker adhere to the Western classical tradition, but with certain Indian elements worked in. Chief among these is the material, the buff and red sandstone quarried in Dholpur, that echoes the similar stone used in the city’s great sultanate and Mughal monuments such as Humayun’s tomb and the Qutb Minar. Both Lutyens and Baker adopted the typical Indian chajja—a stone blade that juts out at the eve to protect the façade from sun and rain. And the rooflines of their buildings are dotted with chhatris, or domed kiosks. ‘Chattris are stupid, useless things,’ Lutyens protested; but he used them. The capitals of his columns at Viceroy’s House are fluted and bell-shaped like some very early Indian examples, while the outline of the great dome and the mouldings on its drum are modelled on the tumulus and railings of the Buddhist stupa at Sanchi.
The two architects described their compromise in rather different ways. Baker’s declared aim was ‘to weave into the fabric of the more elemental and universal [by which he meant Western] forms of architecture the threads of such Indian traditional shapes and features as are compatible with the nature and use of the building’. One might detect some half-heartedness in the idea of ‘compatible shapes’. And his notion of ‘Indian traditional features’ seems to include a large quantity of elephant heads, which no doubt qualify in a literal sense but evoke Indian pageantry more than architecture, and which he does not so much ‘weave into the fabric’ as plaster over the surface. The two Secretariat buildings—North and South Blocks—face each other across the central axial way, their façades enriched by deep elevated porticos that surge forward in a great Baroque gesture that would have startled even Christopher Wren. And just in case you don’t get the fundamental Englishness and imperiousness of it all, the inscription around the entrance portal of North Block reads, ‘Liberty will not descend to a people. A people must raise themselves to Liberty. It is a right that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.’ So don’t be in too much of a hurry then, eh? And meanwhile, to make you feel at home, here’s another elephant head.
Viceroy’s House, designed by Edwin Lutyens, has become Rashtrapati Bhavan; photograph by the author, 1986
Secretariat, North Block, designed by Herbert Baker; photograph by the author, 1986
Lutyens formulated his goal more abstractly: ‘to express modern India in stone, to represent her amazing sense of the supernatural, with its complement of profound fatalism.’ This doesn’t sound like him. It sounds more like something scripted for him by his wife, Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton (daughter of the former viceroy, Lord Lytton), who was a theosophist. Lutyens’s engagement with Indian spiritualism might best be summarized by his description of a visit from his wife’s friend Annie Besant as like having ‘Sunday every day of the week’. But—for all his protests and his loudly expressed contempt—he did engage with Indian architecture. He looked at selected forms with an artist’s eye, not to copy them but to streamline and transform them into something new. The single word of his mission statement that rings true is ‘modern’. There is no doubting that Viceroy’s House is a twentieth-century building.
Critics at the time and since, comparing the contributions of Lutyens and Baker, have generally credited Lutyens with the loftier aim and the finer achievement. The contemporary writer Robert Byron thought that Baker’s handling of Indian details was superficial, that it amounted to ‘writing in symbols’; and he mocked his use of stone screens or jalis, which reminded him of fishnet stockings. The Council House (or Parliament House) is simpler in design and less ornamented than the Secretariats. Its circular form aims again at classical grandeur but is unfortunately inclined to su
ggest the motion of a spinning top instead. Evenly spaced columns in a ring unavoidably suggest motion, as Christopher Wren realized two and a half centuries earlier while designing the dome of St Paul’s. The solution—adopted by Wren—is to insert periodic infills, to act as brake pads. Baker must have known this but chose not to follow Wren’s example.
At the far end of Rajpath (formerly called Kingsway) stands the All-India War Memorial, now generally called India Gate. Designed by Lutyens in 1921, it commemorates 60,000 Indian soldiers who gave their lives overseas during World War I. It is inscribed with the names of the 13,516 ‘missing’: those, whether British or Indian officers and men, who died on the North-West Frontier and in the Third Afghan War of 1919 and whose bodies were never found. As in other memorials of that time, especially those designed by Lutyens, the names are listed without distinction of race or creed. The building bears no religious symbols. Modelled on the triumphal arches of Rome (and later European derivatives like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris), it was meant to appear, above all, imperial.
Under its arch lies the single symbolic grave of an unknown soldier, with a perpetual flame. The small dome over the top of the arch (barely visible from the ground) was intended, in the original design, to emit a continuous plume of smoke, turning the monument into a gigantic incense stick.
Behind the gate stands a tall, slender pavilion or canopy, designed—again by Lutyens in 1936—to house a memorial statue of King George V. The statue was removed after Independence, and since then the canopy has remained empty because the most obvious candidate to replace the king is the ‘Father of the Nation’, Mahatma Gandhi, for whom such a grandiose setting is generally deemed incongruous.
In recent times, India Gate has acquired a new role as a place of peaceful public protest, a shrine of the people’s conscience, like the Lincoln Memorial in Washington or London’s Trafalgar Square. Sometimes the cause is very focused and personal. When a young model was murdered by a politician’s son in 1999, and the investigating agencies and the courts seemed hamstrung, people gathered here in large crowds to demand that the case not be buried with the girl, that they be told who killed her. As a result of this public pressure, a conviction duly followed. Whether it is India Gate’s solemn dignity or merely the ample open surrounding space that made people select it as their site of protest is hard to say. What is clear is that this fine invented tradition has given the already iconic arch a new meaning. Rang de Basanti, a Hindi movie that was released in 2006, the same year that the model’s murderer was eventually convicted, and whose story concerns the personal and political conscience of young people in Delhi, includes a scene where the principal characters drive around India Gate in a mood that is at once earnest and joyful.
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