The central vista that runs from the Viceroy’s House and the Secretariats to India Gate forms the core axis of New Delhi. Almost as controversial as the style of these main buildings was the development of the city’s layout or plan. First came the matter of the site. It was initially assumed that the nucleus of the city would be the Civil Lines, the area beyond the old walled city, by the ridge. This had been the main area of English settlement since the early nineteenth century (though it had even earlier been a place of Mughal gardens). This was where the king–emperor laid the symbolic foundation stone after his speech at the Durbar, and this was the temporary base where Hardinge moved his government during the period of construction. Its association with the events of 1857 also invested it with much emotional significance for the British.
But the planning committee, which included Lutyens, thought that these were all good reasons to abandon it. It was too constricted, too bound up with the past. After considering various options, they selected a site to the south, an open plain, not too cluttered with existing structures and overlooked from the west by a low hill called Raisina. Standing on its crest, looking east towards the river, Lutyens saw enough space to realize the kind of plan he had in mind.
It is a great geometrical extravaganza, with long, straight ceremonial vistas, one vast sweeping curve at the back, and roads emanating at angles from roundabouts to meet the corners of interlocking hexagons. It is a pattern, designed to appeal on the page, rather than a response to topography or to considerations of need. Some historic monuments, such as the Purana Qila, are locked into the pattern and given a supporting role, like attendant follies, and Raisina and the river frame it, but it makes little other reference to the landscape. A number of different ideas inform its design. Most obviously, the scale, the grandeur and the geometry follow a Beaux Arts tradition of city planning. But the lack of density in terms of buildings—the main ceremonial route is flanked by lawns rather than buildings, for example—derives more from the English tradition of garden cities. And the bungalows on huge plots, each surrounded by a boundary wall (and often a guard), are reminiscent of the cantonments of British India.
This area is still commonly called the Lutyens Bungalow Zone (or LBZ)—a slight misnomer as the bungalows were designed by assistants, though the overall plan was his. Its lack of density remains a matter of controversy. Some insist that its green and open character is under threat as individual plots are gradually being redeveloped. But others feel that such openness is anyway inappropriate for the capital of such an enormous country, and happily contemplate the bungalows all being swept away (perhaps along with the politicians and bureaucrats who are privileged to live in them) and replaced by tightly packed high-rises. Perhaps they just mean to provoke, but they are right in regarding Delhi as a city with an empty core. As you move out from the peaceful centre, the housing colonies and suburbs become increasingly dense and teeming.
Arguments about conservation and development in New Delhi invariably invoke the name of Lutyens, as if its preservation is something owed to him as the presiding genius. There are some people who insist that such reverence is unwarranted, that greater credit should be given not just to the many other architects who designed the buildings of New Delhi, but to the viceroys and officials who oversaw their construction, and to the Punjabi contractors who actually put them together. Quite right. But it is also worth pointing out that if Lutyens has consistently enjoyed a high reputation in Delhi, the same is not true in his own country. Architectural opinion in post-war Britain was dominated by people like Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and Sir John Summerson, men of discernment but whose sympathies lay with the International Modern Movement, and for whom Lutyens’s historicism (to say nothing of his politics) made him anathema. When they wrote the history of British architecture, they simply ignored him as an anachronism, an irrelevance. The American architect and theorist Robert Venturi acknowledged the genius of Lutyens as early as the 1960s, but it was another twenty years before writers like Gavin Stamp brought his work back into the view of the general public in Britain.
Lutyens’s fall from grace among British intellectuals would have astonished his colleague, Herbert Baker. Reflecting on the place of New Delhi in the broad sweep of Indian history, Baker declared, ‘In 2000 years there must be an Imperial Lutyens tradition in Indian architecture.’ The remark shows untypical generosity towards his colleague and sometime rival, acknowledging the younger architect’s superior powers of design. Allowing for some exaggeration, the idea might have seemed plausible at the time, in view of some of the city’s recent buildings. Because, working alongside Lutyens and Baker were numerous assistants who at various times set up independent practices and won commissions to design major new buildings, many of which reflect in some measure the influence of the Lutyens style.
They include the Cathedral of the Redemption, designed by Henry Medd in 1928, whose interlocking geometrical volumes are clearly inspired by Lutyens’s treatment of massing. The success of the design rests on its lack of fuss. There is just so much embellishment as is required to articulate an entrance—no more—and no fear of plain surfaces. In this it resembles the modern classical aesthetic of Lutyens, achieved, for example, in his design of Hyderabad House, a palace for the Nizam of Hyderabad. St Martin’s Garrison Church, designed by A.G. Shoosmith in 1928–30, takes the process a step further, creating a remarkable abstracted form. When Shoosmith told Lutyens that he proposed to use only brick, Lutyens’s advice was to ‘Go for the Roman wall’. He meant avoid the decorative Queen Anne Revival ornament that was then so much in fashion in Britain. The detailing, where it exists, is sternly architectural, a reworking of the lines of classical mouldings, as Lutyens himself had done with consummate virtuosity at India Gate.
The Cathedral Church of the Redemption, designed by Henry Medd in 1928; photograph by the author, 1991
Perspective of Jaipur House, New Delhi, designed by C.G. and F.B. Blomfield; from the Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects, April 1938
Closest to the style of the master is Jaipur House, designed by C.G. Blomfield, assisted by his brother Francis, for the Maharaja of Jaipur in 1936. It is so close indeed that it has often been wrongly attributed to Lutyens himself (or assumed to be by him). But the Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects, when reporting its completion in 1938, clearly attributed it to the Blomfields; and one of the original signed blueprints survives in the archives of the City Palace in Jaipur. The blocky massing of the main building, especially around the dome, is very reminiscent of Lutyens, while the materials and colour scheme also signal a clear attempt to harmonize with the buildings of both Lutyens and Baker. The decorative screen that surrounded the (now sadly destroyed) swimming pool in the garden was a free copy of a screen in the Mughal Gardens behind Viceroy’s House.
Lutyens-style massing was carried forward by Walter George in buildings such as the Modern School (1936), where the deep shade created by the overhanging chajja pays homage to the similar lighting effects in Viceroy’s House. Lutyens, with a touch of Shoosmith, emerges again in St Stephen’s College, designed by George in 1938. It is like a mini St Martin’s.
So there was a Delhi Lutyens school, but not the general and lasting tradition imagined by Baker. There could not be because these works were outnumbered by those of the Delhi Public Works Department under Robert Tor Russell who adopted a more traditional and prosaic neoclassical style in conspicuous buildings such as the Eastern and Western Courts (1922); the official residence of the commander-in-chief (1930; later used by Jawaharlal Nehru, and now a library and museum known as Teen Murti Bhavan); and the main commercial centre, Connaught Circus (1931).
The irony is that while the rapid construction of all these buildings—government offices, courts, churches, shops and homes—looks like assembling the infrastructure of an empire that was meant to last, they actually provided one of the scenes for its political dismantling. The last thirty years of British rule saw frantic building in
New Delhi alongside a process of negotiation and protest that led inevitably to departure; and both were played out against the backdrop, of course, of two world wars.
It is a difficult period to summarize. But if viewed from a Delhi perspective, certain moments appear salient. By 1917, when construction (delayed by World War I) was still in its early stages, the British government under Lloyd George was already committed to the principle of Indian self-rule within the empire. The Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms of 1919 increased the authority of provincial councils and established a Central Legislative Assembly. This decisive step towards sharing power with elected representatives created the need for the Council House designed by Baker, and explains its curious position, off axis from the other main buildings: it was an afterthought, added after the main plan had been drawn up. Originally designed to house both the new assembly and the Chamber of Princes, it is now called Sansad Bhavan and houses both the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha, the two houses of India’s Parliament.
The 1920s, the period when the Viceroy’s House and the government buildings were being erected, was marked by protest across India, from the civil disobedience campaign of 1920 to Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt March of 1930. When New Delhi was ceremonially inaugurated by Viceroy Lord Irwin on 13 February 1931, delegates were still returning to India from the first of the three Round Table Conferences held in London (1930–32), which charted India’s route to dominion status. Despite the further twists along the way, and the major diversion caused by World War II, the path was then set that led eventually to the appointment of Lord Mountbatten as the last viceroy and to the achievement of India’s independence in 1947.
On the night of 14 August, shortly before the midnight moment of freedom, independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru delivered his famous ‘tryst with destiny’ speech to the constituent assembly sitting in Baker’s building. Outside, joyous crowds thronged the ceremonial way planned by Lutyens. What might have been the symbols of a great empire were transformed at the stroke of the midnight hour into the foundation stones of a new nation.
Partition and Growth: Independent India
Delhi changed from being an imperial city to the capital of a free nation overnight. Sadly, not all aspects of the transition were so smooth. The price of Independence was the partition of Bengal in the east and of Punjab in the west, to create the two separate parts of Pakistan. The plan was drawn up and the lines determined on the basis of the religious identity of the existing population. The idea was to include regions that were predominantly Muslim in the two parts of Pakistan. So, a point that is often forgotten, initially large-scale migrations were not expected. The solution offered to those who found themselves on the wrong side of the line was a promise to safeguard the rights of religious minorities within each of the new states.
But the people themselves were understandably mistrustful. If the division was to be on religious lines, many wanted to be with their own kind. They packed and started to move, in what became one of the largest migrations in human history. Estimates vary but at least twelve million people—and possibly twice that number—crossed the two borders. As they had to abandon their land, their homes and their employment, gathering only the few chattels they could carry to head off into the unknown, passions ran high. Reports and rumours of confrontations sparked revenge attacks. There were violent clashes between passing columns of refugees and terrible massacres on trains and in the streets of previously peaceful neighbourhoods. Again the figures are disputed, but at least half a million—possibly many more—men, women and children were slaughtered.
The impact of this on Delhi was immense. Punjab was on Delhi’s threshold (indeed Delhi was once administratively a part of Punjab). Many of those migrating from cities like Lahore and Multan, now in Pakistan, made straight for the capital, in search of a new life to replace what they had been forced to leave behind. The population of Delhi, which was less than half a million at the start of the century (before the transfer of the capital) had crept up to a million by 1947. With Partition the population doubled to two million almost overnight. The new arrivals crowded first into the refugee camps in the Purana Qila and Kingsway Camp (north of the old city, near the present Delhi University campus) and then settled in the new colonies built specially for them by the government, such as Lajpat Nagar, Rajinder Nagar and the aptly named Punjabi Bagh. As they established themselves and began to flourish, these immigrants changed the balance of the city’s identity. The old culture of the established Muslim families of Shajahanabad was eclipsed by a new culture which struck many by comparison as rootless and displaced, and perhaps a touch provincial.
The effects of the influx are still with us. The population of the National Capital Region in 2017, seventy years after Partition, was approaching twenty million, ten times what is was then. But still, at the time of writing, everyone has a friend or a neighbour or a relative who came from Punjab back in 1947 with nothing. Sometimes they speak longingly of their fathers’ orchards and of the fine mansions they grew up in, and a little ruefully of the hard life they had to endure on reaching Delhi. To be sure, there was optimism in the air in Delhi in the 1950s, when Nehru ruled, but the hope was about long-term investment in the future not about immediate gains, and for many the lifestyle was somewhat austere.
With the passing of the generations the Punjabi identity has not been diluted. The immigrants’ grandchildren, who now flock the halls of Delhi’s colleges in jeans and T-shirts, proudly identify themselves as Delhiites. They may know nothing of their grandparents’ birthplaces, but they bear Punjabi names and eat Punjabi food, and on formal family occasions don Punjabi clothes and perform the same rituals as their forefathers. Theirs is a culture in permanent exile that has taken over its assumed home.
When Nehru addressed the nation at Independence, he urged his compatriots to commit themselves to ‘the service of India’. Though conscious of the ‘trackless centuries’ of India’s past, he saw his own time as a moment ‘when we step out from the old to the new’. But he warned that the ‘future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving’: ‘we have to labour and to work . . . to build the noble mansion of free India’.
Many believed him, and perhaps more readily in Delhi, a city that was ancient but also new and quite visibly still under construction. Despite the burden of history, so much seemed to be missing to those looking out on an unfinished urban landscape. So they joined hands to build the political, cultural and financial institutions of the future. Under the guidance of B.R. Ambedkar, they framed a new constitution that turned India into a republic in 1950 and founded the universities, the museums, the handicraft boards and academies of music, dance and drama that Delhi had never had.
The spirit of optimism persisted, to some extent, during the early administrations of Nehru’s daughter and eventual successor as prime minister, Indira Gandhi, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Threats loomed in the international arena, with the Indo-China border dispute of 1962 and the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965. But even that outlook seemed less worrisome by 1971, when renewed conflict with Pakistan led to the emergence of its eastern portion as the independent state of Bangladesh, with Indian support, despite the doubts of American and other international opinion about India’s motives. Indira Gandhi’s resolute stand earned her immense popularity at home.
But within a few years, her increasingly autocratic style of governance, political cronyism and the lack of economic development created a spiral of disillusionment. The nadir was reached in June 1975 when Mrs Gandhi declared a state of emergency, to pre-empt court action against her and to enable her to rule by diktat. It lasted nearly two years until March 1977, during which period many of her political opponents and vocal critics including journalists spent time cooling their heels in Tihar Jail. Important policy decisions were made arbitrarily by unelected people she appointed, including her younger son, Sanjay. Concerned about demographers’ doomsday predictions about the likely effect of India�
�s population growth, Sanjay organized a ruthless sterilization campaign. As productive householders were unwilling to come forward, his officials targeted the vulnerable—the elderly and children—to meet their target quotas. There were many other such abuses. It all ended with Mrs Gandhi’s removal from power—indeed the ejection of the Congress party from office for the first time since Independence—and her own eventual incarceration in Tihar.
Mrs Gandhi recovered from the Emergency and served again as the prime minister in the early 1980s. But Delhi—the hothouse of Indian politics—never fully recovered from the trauma of those days. Today, there are leaders of national parties whose careers were forged in the crucible of student protest during the Emergency and for whom the first (and sometimes it seems the only) principle of political morality is opposition to the Congress, whoever the Congress today happens to be or what it stands for. There are elderly journalists and commentators who still exude nothing but bile towards anyone or any institution associated with Mrs Gandhi (though one or two who still maintain that she and young Sanjay were just doing their best). And much of the population of Delhi is resigned to cynicism about politicians, convinced that their only purpose is to seize and hold on to power for their own sake, at the cost of the common good.
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