Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  THIS MONUMENT WAS ERECTED BY A GRATEFUL PEOPLE TO THE HONOURED MEMORY OF THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO SERVED THE EMPIRE IN THE GREAT WAR OF 1914–1918.

  9

  New Delhi

  ‘The Rome of Hindustan’

  ‘The Rome of Hindustan lies on a scorched and windswept plain, historied with tumbledown memorials of the Mohammedan conquerors. Across this plain glitters now an English Delhi, a vision of domes and towers, pink and cream against the morning blue and new green trees below.’ Even the great travel writer Robert Byron thought words could barely do justice to this virgin city: the monumentality of New Delhi had to be seen to be believed – ‘dome, tower, dome, tower, dome, red, pink, cream, and white, washed gold and flashing in the morning sun. The traveller loses a breath, and with it his apprehensions and preconceptions. Here is something not merely worthy, but whose like has never been.’1

  The new city’s inauguration, which began with a thirty-one-gun salute booming out from the gardens of the Viceroy’s House, appropriately reflected its imperial grandeur. ‘The cold weather sunlight shone down on a brilliant spectacle staged between the north and south blocks of the twin Secretariats,’ reported The Times of 11 February 1931. ‘The guards of honour mounted by the 2nd Battalion, The York and Lancaster Regiment on the one hand and the 1st Royal Battalion, The 9th Jat Regiment on the other, took up position. There were marching and counter-marching by the band of The Royal Fusiliers from Agra.’2 Then there were investitures at the Durbar Hall, banquets at the Viceroy’s House, fly-bys from the RAF ‘after the manner of the Hendon display’, a ‘Hog Hunters Ball’ at the Imperial Delhi Gymkhana Club, polo tournaments, garden parties, as well as a People’s Fête on the sand banks between the Red Fort and the River Jumna – telling the story, in case anyone missed the point, of imperial rule through military drill and martial music. The festivities came to a climax on 15 February with the consecration of New Delhi’s Cathedral Church of the Redemption, as the Bishop of Lahore led the congregation in the hymn ‘City of God’: ‘Let us build the city of God / May our tears be turned into dancing / For the Lord our light and our love has turned the night into day.’

  But even with such festivities, The Times was forced to admit ‘it would be idle to pretend that the ceremony had any popular support’. All the approaches to the capital were ‘plastered with armed police’ and ‘attendance was confined entirely to those admitted by official invitation’.3 ‘So New Delhi is inaugurated in an atmosphere of political uncertainty rather than of political confidence,’ thought the Yorkshire Post. ‘There are in India those who see in it a memorial, indeed, to British enterprise and orderly development, but also a sepulchre of British influence and authority in India. It appears to them the tombstone of the British Raj.’4

  The real engine of history was elsewhere. Two days after the cathedral’s consecration, with the marquees slowly being dismantled, Mahatma Gandhi entered Delhi from Allahabad, in a third-class train compartment. ‘Huddled in a blanket, Mr Gandhi … drove up the stately avenues, which only last week were coloured with all the pageantry of the inauguration of Imperial Delhi.’ At 2.30 p.m., he ascended the steps of the Viceroy’s House to be greeted by Lord Irwin – ‘and it was not until nearly four hours later that he drove away again’. This time there was no doubting the level of popular support. A crowd of 80,000 – ‘a blaze of colour, as hundreds had discarded the white khaddar (home-spun) for the many-coloured garments worn at the traditional celebration of the Eid festival’ – surged into the Queen’s Gardens to hear the apostle of independence ready the Indian people for further sacrifice on the road to freedom.5

  In London, there was no such enthusiasm for Gandhi’s arrival into New Delhi. From an imperial city designed to show the permanence of British rule, its architecture dripping in the invincibility of mission, it seemed government officials were preparing to surrender the Jewel in the Crown. Having at vast expense restored Delhi as the capital of India, the British now looked ready to quit. At a gathering of the West Essex Conservative Association in February 1931, Winston Churchill could do little to repress his repugnance at both the weakness of Viceroy Irwin (his future bête noire, the pro-appeasement Earl of Halifax) and the impudence of Gandhi:

  It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.6

  Churchill knew that the loss of India meant the end of Empire. When the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, walked the New Delhi construction site in 1920, he had thought the same. ‘This will be the finest ruin of them all,’ he gleefully remarked.

  Except, of course, it isn’t. After Indian independence in 1947, the architecture and edifices designed by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker were seamlessly adopted by the liberated Indian nation.* The Viceroy’s House became the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the president’s official residence; the Council House became the Parliament House, with its lower Lok Sabha and upper Rajya Sabha; the Kingsway became the Rajpath; and Connaught Place would, in theory at least, turn into Rajiv Chowk. The statues of King George V and Queen Victoria were removed, and the road names of York and Canning were changed, but at the midnight hour New Delhi’s bureaucratic fabric continued as a place of power – just with a different set of rulers. Today the generals, ministers, planners and plutocrats of the confident, prosperous New India speed along Akbar Road into government departments or head down Lodi Road to berate international development agencies. New Delhi’s clean, wide boulevards, five-star hotels, high-security apparatus, lush planting and cordoned-off villas provide an air of exclusivity and authority for the governing classes which sits well with the advancing geopolitical ambitions of modern India. As such, New Delhi can feel all too reminiscent of old Empire. In the judgement of two contemporary Indian commentators,

  Today, Lutyens’s Delhi houses the seat of government segregated from the chaos and vitality of this country. It has its own municipality, has been designated a ‘VIP’ zone, and remains insulated from the truth and idea of India. The retreating colonial power handed the baton to free India’s ruling class that continues to live in quarantine, in a free-from-squalor, unreal disconnected compound ‘city’.7

  For the Delhi-based British writer Sam Miller, the Lutyens Bungalow Zone, where the political elite reside in exclusive, low-rent accommodation, ‘is one of the most tangible vestiges of a dying British Empire in India, a place which was deliberately designed to exclude the ruled’.8

  This contemporary hostility towards the elitism of New Delhi might go some way to explain the remarkable absence of celebration on the centenary of its foundation in 2011. ‘“Official” India, which otherwise loves to organise tacky commemorations by producing unappealing postage stamps, gave this event a wide birth,’ commented journalist Swapan Dasgupta. Historian Malvika Singh similarly noted the commemorative vacuum. ‘Any other nation would have had the prime minister marking the occasion by addressing the people in a live broadcast,’ she wrote in the Telegraph. Instead, ‘the Centre’ thought the anniversary had no need ‘to be commemorated or celebrated because those who rule us see it as a colonial legacy’. For Singh, this smacked of ‘a deep-seated insecurity, a disease that has overwhelmed an “immature” leadership that does not have the emotional or the intellectual wherewithal to embrace 200 or more years of the nation’s history, its more recent past, and, like it or not, the legacy of India’.9 Dasgupta agreed that this refusal to engage with the imperial past meant ‘India had yet to develop the necessary self-confidence to view history as history’.10

  Such political trepidation was just the most recent manifestation of a deep-seated ambivalence about the meaning and purpose of New Delhi that has long been a part of the city’s history. Often regarded as the pinnacle of imperial self-confidence, the foun
dation of the capital of British India was wrought with ambiguity about the nature of Empire from the start.

  NINEVEH AND TYRE

  The spectre of decline consumed the late Victorian imagination. Naturally, they turned for guidance on the topic to the sublime prose of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89). ‘The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness,’ Gibbon told them. ‘Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.’11 As a twenty-year-old cavalry subaltern stationed in Bangalore in 1895, the young Winston Churchill spent his leisure hours digesting these lessons of the imperial past: ‘All through the long glistening middle hours of the Indian day, from when we quitted stables till the evening shadows proclaimed the hour of Polo, I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all.’12 On his return to England in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, he discovered he was not alone in his enthusiasm for Gibbon’s enlightened scepticism. ‘There were not wanting those who said that in this Jubilee year our Empire had reached the height of its glory and power, and that now we should begin to decline, as Babylon, Carthage and Rome had declined.’13 One of those siren voices was none other than the child of Bombay, Rudyard Kipling, whose Jubilee ode ‘Recessional’ gave voice to the looming end of Empire:

  Far-called, our navies melt away;

  On dune and headland sinks the fire:

  Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

  Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

  Lest we forget – lest we forget!

  Paradoxically such fears escalated during the greatest assertion of British power since the eighteenth century: between 1860 and 1909, the territorial extent of the British Empire grew from 24.6 million square kilometres to 32.9 million, putting some 444 million people under some form of British rule. For Joseph Chamberlain and his Imperial Federation ideologues, an expanding Empire and a Greater Britain posed a public policy problem of economic tariffs and systems of international governance. To disciples of Gibbon, however, such enormous expansion hastened a more existential crisis. ‘The power of Imperial Rome was broken in conquering the world; it dwindled away, century after century,’ the Anglo-Australian politician Robert Lowe warned the House of Commons in 1878.14 It was overstretch which had undermined the Roman Empire, and now Britain was repeating the mistake.15 The signal moment for such fears was the calamity of the Second Boer War (1899–1902), when the Dutch exiles of the Cape Colony (whom we last saw starting out upon the Great Trek in the 1830s) sought to resist the conversion of the Transvaal and Orange Free State – with their untapped gold-mines – into British colonies. For three years, the Boers’ sharp-shooting and guerrilla tactics managed to outfox the might of the British army. In the ‘Black Week’ in December 1899, nearly 3,000 British troops were killed, wounded or captured at the Battles of Stormberg, Magersfontein and Colenso. ‘The condition of South Africa today is the most bitter commentary on our supposed imperial strength,’ declared Lord Milner, high commissioner for South Africa. ‘Here is a single Colony, not by any means one of the largest in the Empire, in which a bare majority of disaffected people is able to disorganise our whole South African policy … and threaten the foundations of the Empire itself.’16

  In Britain, the military and imperial weaknesses exposed by the Boer War produced a paroxysm of soul-searching. The rot was located in the ‘heart of Empire’ itself – the big cities of Britain which had succumbed to indolence, luxury, homosexuality and racial degeneration. They were responsible for pretty much every ill which it was hoped the clean-living suburbs of Melbourne and the pure-bred colonial race of the White Dominions would cure. The social reformer Lord Brabazon thought that if a gentleman took a walk through the streets of London, ‘Should he be of average height, he will find himself a head taller than those around him; he will see on all sides pale faces, stunted figures, debilitated forms, narrow chests, and all the outward signs of a low vital power.’ He feared that ‘large numbers of the inhabitants of our cities are physically unfitted, though in the prime of life, to defend the country in time of war’. And when the call up came for the Boer War, tens of thousands of recruits were indeed turned down for military service, leading to the establishment of an Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration in 1904. ‘With a perpetual lowering of the vitality of the Imperial Race in the great cities of the kingdom,’ warned the lead critic of urban England Charles Masterman, ‘no amount of hectic, feverish activity on the confines of the Empire will be able to arrest the inevitable decline.’17

  When these fears were combined with the rise of American and German military power, the moral costs of colonialism exposed by the use of concentration camps during the Boer War and the fiscal damage produced by an economy over-dependent upon imperial finance, the longevity of the British Empire looked precarious. So much so that in 1905 a young Tory pamphleteer, Elliott Mills, penned The Decline and Fall of the British Empire – a spoof work of futuristic history, published in ‘Tokio, 2005’ and appointed for use in the ‘National Schools of Japan’, which recounted the loss of British India to Russia, the South African colonies to Germany and all of Australia to Japan. Its thesis was clear: ‘Had the English people, at the opening of the Twentieth Century, turned to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, they might have found in it a not inaccurate description of themselves. This they failed to do, and we know the results.’18 Clearly, such doubts had to be dispelled. ‘Do not believe these croakers,’ countered Churchill, ‘but give the lie to their dismal croaking by showing by your actions that the vigour and vitality of our race is unimpaired and that our determination is to uphold the Empire … and carry out our mission of bearing peace, civilisation and good government to the uttermost ends of the earth.’19 India – ‘the most truly bright and precious jewel in the crown of the King’ – was the obvious place to begin.

  DURBAR IMPERIALISM

  ‘The day on which the Durbar was held was a perfect winter’s day with a bright sun, blue sky and cool breeze,’ proudly remembered the Indian viceroy, Lord Hardinge, of his 1911 Delhi durbar for King George V and Queen Mary. ‘The spectacle was really as magnificent as it was possible to imagine.’20 Beginning in the spring, some 20,000 Indians had been at work transforming the barren fields around Delhi Ridge – where the British had made their last stand during the 1857 Indian Mutiny – into Coronation Park, a neverland of royal-imperial pomp and circumstance. Today the park has returned to scrubland, encircled by a roaring ring-road, bland commercial developments and exposed drains. Some vestiges of colonial pre-history are kept on life-support (as in Mumbai’s Byculla Gardens) in a gated pen of deposed imperial statues, peopled by the likes of Viceroy Irwin and even King George himself, having been removed from the Rajpath. It would take a heroic leap of imagination now to conceive of this grubby wasteland, consumed by the urgent urbanism of the New India, as playing host to the British Empire’s most spectacular display of faux-regal chivalry.

  The Royal pavilion rose from a broad base in three tiers, ascended by broad stairways, to a central structure supported by four slender columns and surmounted by a huge gilt bulbous dome. This dome rose out of a kind of balustrade of gilt fretted work with four small domes at the four corners, beneath which extended a kind of gilt verandah, and beyond this a canopy of crimson velvet with a broad straight fringe of crimson and gold.

  Here the Imperial Thrones, ‘resplendent in crimson and gold’, sat 20 feet above the ground, awaiting Their Imperial Highnesses.

  Both were arrayed in Royal attire; the King in the raiment of white satin which he wore at the Coronation in Westminster Abbey … The Queen was dressed in white embroidered with gold, with a robe of purple, a circlet of emeralds and diamonds
on her head, and the Orders of the Garter and of the Crown of India.

  A salute of 101 guns at midday was the signal for 100,000 spectators to stand and cheer the arrival of the royal couple’s open landau, escorted by the 10th Hussars, V Battery of Horse Artillery and the Eighteenth Indian Lancers – ‘all this long parti-coloured procession, winding its devious way half seen above the immovable forest of turbans, helmets, bayonets and lance-pennons, presented a spectacle of amazing majesty and grandeur’. Arriving at a royal canopy beyond the central pavilion, the new king-emperor gave a short speech – ‘To all present, feudatories and subjects, I tender my loving greetings’ – and then the serious business of paying homage started. The viceroy genuflected first, ‘bowing low thrice as he approached the throne, and finally kneeling to kiss His Majesty’s hand, a distinction confined to him alone. To Lord Hardinge succeeded the members of his Executive Council; and then followed the Ruling Chiefs of Hyderabad, Baroda, Mysore, Kashmir, Rajputana, Central India, Baluchistan, Sikkim and Bhutan.’ When the kow-towing of the Indian princes had finally subsided, the king and queen walked to the main pavilion, and then came the drum and trumpets summoning the herald. ‘Through the gap in the vast Mound rode the tall soldierly Delhi Herald, General Peyton, in a tabard bearing the Royal Standard front and back, together with the Assistant-Herald, Malik Umar Hayat Khan, a Punjab magnate of martial bearing.’ After reading out the king-emperor’s proclamation, the chief herald doffed his helmet, called for three cheers for the king and queen and brought the official ceremony to an end. After Their Royal Highnesses had exited the pavilion, ‘the people rushed down … and prostrating themselves, pressed their foreheads against the marble steps. Soon, as the crush became too great, they were fain to touch the pavilion with their hands and press their fingers to their foreheads, content with this, so only they could pay homage to the one supreme ruler of all India.’21