Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  Luckily, The Times was on hand to decipher the meaning of this gaudy, medieval ritual – acted out amid the modern age of steamships, telephones, global capital flows and immunization. ‘The ceremony at its culminating point exactly typified the Oriental conception of the ultimate repositories of Imperial power,’ the newspaper explained. ‘The Monarchs sat alone, remote but beneficent, raised far above the multitude, but visible to all, clad in rich vestments, flanked by radiant emblems of authority, guarded by a glittering array of troops, the cynosure of the proudest Princes of India.’ It reassured its British readership: ‘The Durbar has been far more than a mere success. It has been a triumphant vindication of the wise prescience which conceived and planned it.’22

  In fact, it represented the culmination of an imperial strategy which had been pursued since the catastrophe of the 1857 Mutiny. The longer-term response of the British government to rebuilding imperial authority in India, after they had exiled the Mughal emperor and putative Mutiny ringleader Bahadur Shah II (Zafar), was not simply to disband the East India Company and transfer authority to the Crown, with a secretary of state for India in the Cabinet and a viceroy on the ground. It was also to reimagine the very nature of that authority. The Utilitarianism of Thomas Malthus’s Haileybury, of Lord Macaulay and William Bentinck would no longer do; nor would the bureaucratic municipalism of Bartle Frere in Bombay. Instead, the ambition was to reach back to the kind of imperial grandeur which Richard Wellesley – for whom India should ‘be ruled from a palace, not from a counting-house’ – had first attempted in 1800s Calcutta and so manipulate Indian hierarchies of caste and princeship into the service of the British Empire. Rather than battling against the grain of Indian society, attempting to Westernize the colony with the high-flown theorems of Bentham and Mill (‘making Anglo-Saxons of the Hindoos’, as Sir Thomas Munro put it), the idea now was to marshal the native princes of India into governing under the imprimatur of the British Empire. Benjamin Disraeli’s Royal Titles Act of 1876 signalled the new approach in anointing Queen Victoria as empress of India. ‘This audacious appropriation consolidated and completed the British-Indian hierarchy,’ as historian David Cannadine puts it, ‘as the queen herself replaced the defunct Mughal emperor at the summit of the social order: she was now an eastern potentate as well as a western sovereign.’23

  Only such a strategy of ‘Ornamentalism’, as Cannadine has coined it, can explain the appointment of the poet, novelist, socialite and diplomat-dilettante Edward Bulwer-Lytton as viceroy of India in 1876. His remit was to deploy all of his Romantic, imaginative flair in making flesh this new imperial philosophy. With his gifted feel for melodrama, Lord Lytton chose as his vehicle one of the most ancient rituals of the Mughal empire – the durbar display of princely fealty. The first great durbar took place in Delhi on 1 January 1877 to celebrate the proclamation of Victoria as queen-empress, with over 400 Indian princes paying homage to Lytton as the Crown’s representative (even as hundreds of thousands of other Indians died of famine in Madras and the viceroy instructed Sir Richard Temple not to alleviate the starving of Bombay). In the capital of what was once the Mughal Empire, it was a visual affirmation of the new imperial settlement: a symbolic display of choreographed power to show the British Crown working in alliance with a subordinate hierarchy of indigenous princes, ruling India as if by consent.

  When his time came, the maniacally competitive Lord Curzon would seek to outdo Lord Lytton’s 1877 pageant. Appointed viceroy in 1899 in Government House, the Calcutta residence which Lord Wellesley had modelled on Curzon’s ancestral seat of Kedleston Hall, George Nathaniel Curzon was passionate about the archaeology and ancient history of India.24 He passed an Ancient Monuments Bill, oversaw repairs to artefacts across India and was closely involved in the restoration of the Taj Mahal at Agra. The notion of a durbar was instinctively compelling to a viceroy who saw the British Empire as the natural successor to his beloved, vanished Mughal dynasties. It too had a quasi-divine calling. He told his officials:

  To remember that the Almighty has placed your hand on the greatest of his ploughs … to drive the blade a little forward in your time, and to feel that somewhere among these millions you have left a little justice or happiness or prosperity, a sense of manliness or moral dignity, a spring of patriotism, a dawn of intellectual enlightenment, or a stirring of duty, where it did not exist before.25

  Curzon was adamant that India was the lynchpin of British imperial hegemony around the world – as had been demonstrated when the British expeditionary force sailed from India to capture Hong Kong in 1842.

  If you want to save your Colony of Natal from being over-run by a formidable enemy, you ask India for help, and she gives it; if you want to rescue the white men’s legations from massacre at Peking, and the need is urgent, you request the Government of India to despatch an expedition … It is with Indian coolie labour that you exploit the plantations equally of Demerara and Natal; with Indian trained officers that you irrigate and dam the Nile; with Indian forest officers that you tap the resources of Central Africa and Siam.26

  As long as Britain ruled India, it remained the greatest empire in the world: ‘if we lose it, we shall drop straight away to a third-rate power’. Like Churchill, he refused to believe the dismal croakings. ‘Let no man admit the craven fear that those who have won India cannot hold it,’ Curzon insisted in 1904. ‘This is not my forecast of the future. To me the message is carved in granite, it is hewn out of the rock of doom – that our work is righteous and that it shall endure.’27 In Calcutta, his response to the spectre of decline was the marble grandeur of the Victoria Memorial; in Delhi, it was the durbar of January 1903 to celebrate the accession of King Edward VII to the throne. Curzon’s durbar, in the self-same Coronation Park, was even bigger, grander and more expensive than that of 1877 – affirming to Indian princes and Westminster politicians alike both the unquestioning commitment of British rule in India and the naturalness of their Empire as heirs to the Mughal tradition.

  Curzon’s other attempt to sustain British hegemony in India, the partition of Bengal, was noticeably less successful. The Bengal province, which also included Assam, Bihar and Orissa and a combined population of 80 million Indians, was too large to govern effectively, and partition had been debated for decades. The viceroy’s solution was to split it into a new, Muslim-dominated province of East Bengal and Assam and, in the west, a combination of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa with a non-Bengali majority population. Yet the politics of partition were just as urgent as the administrative demands, since the vocal nationalism of the Indian National Congress in Calcutta had started to unnerve Government House. ‘Bengal united is a power; Bengal divided will pull in different ways,’ noted Curzon’s home secretary. ‘One of our main objects is to split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule.’28 But rather than undermining nationalism, splitting Bengal unleashed years of struggle against British rule. Furious at the prospect of partition, the Swadeshi or home-industry movement was born as Bengalis, in an echo of their colonial forebears in 1760s Boston, started to boycott British-made goods, before moving on to demonstrations and civil disobedience. The British reacted with a twentieth-century version of the Coercive Acts (which had sought to eliminate civil disobedience in Boston after the Tea-Party),* complete with arbitrary arrests and detention, all of which served only to heighten Bengali anger and to leave Calcutta increasingly exposed as the capital of British India.

  With Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland and the Union of South Africa all enjoying the much greater political autonomy which came with ‘Dominion’ status within the British Empire, there were growing calls in the 1900s for India to enjoy similar rights to self-government and equality to the United Kingdom. Part of the official British response to such pressure was to accelerate political reforms to deepen Indian participation in the institutions of government. In 1909 John Morley, the secretary of state for India, worked with Lord Minto, Curzon’s success
or as viceroy, to pass the Indian Councils Act allowing for non-official Indian majorities in the provincial legislatures. It was a conscious attempt to divide the Indian population and conciliate the urban intelligentsia, but it stopped well short of full representative government. What was more, there was no question of the Indian Civil Service – the day-to-day rulers of the Raj – being opened up to suitably qualified Indians. The Indian had a long way to go, British officialdom concluded, before the responsibility of sovereignty could be handed down. In the meantime, there would be further attempts to introduce limited forms of self-government, as part of a route towards Dominion status – all of which would continue to be managed for the foreseeable future under the righteous banner of Empire.

  The king-emperor himself suggested a different response to the rise of Indian nationalism. ‘Ever since I visited India five years ago [as Prince of Wales] I have been impressed by the great advantage which would result from a visit by the sovereign to that great Empire,’ King George V wrote to Lord Morley in 1910. ‘I am convinced that if it were possible for me, accompanied by the Queen, to … hold a Coronation Durbar at Delhi, where should meet all the Princes, officials and vast numbers of the People, the greatest benefits would accrue to the Country at large.’ To allay the revolutionary impulse in India, the answer was less democracy and more pageantry. What was more, the king had a clever idea to mark the first visit of a ruling British sovereign to India and becalm the partition fury. ‘Why not make the two Bengals into a Presidency like Bombay and Madras? This would flatter the Bengalis very much, allay discontent and stop sedition, and would be well worth the extra cost to the country. Think it over!’29 When a clever mandarin, Sir John Jenkins, suggested that the king’s scheme could be combined with the removal of the capital from Calcutta – which allowed the reunification of Bengal to be presented as part of a strategic plan, rather than a hurried surrender to nationalist agitation – the unexpected finale of the 1911 durbar was assured. ‘The trumpeters sounded another fanfare, and then to the general surprise, for the official programme gave no hint of such a thing, His Majesty rose, holding a paper in his hand. With clear voice and just emphasis he announced that the capital of India would be transferred from Calcutta to Delhi.’ This declaration of a New Delhi flew, we are told, from the centre of Coronation Park, ‘to both flanks with a buzz as of passing bees’.30

  THE EMPRESS OF CITIES

  King George V also decreed that the future capital of British India would be an entirely new city to be set against the historic backdrop of Old Delhi. ‘It is my desire that the planning and designing of the public buildings to be erected will be considered with the greatest deliberation and care, so that the new creation may be in every way worthy of this ancient and beautiful city.’31 But why Delhi? Why, at a cost of some £4 million, move the capital of British India from the City of Palaces to start all over again on a site notorious for its searing heat, terrible sanitation and malarial air? There were, in the first place, the obvious security advantages for decamping from an increasingly dangerous Bengal. Then there was Delhi’s strategic location, close to the North-West Frontier, from which the British were increasingly determined the Russians had to be kept away. Additionally, it stood equidistant between the great ports of Karachi, Bombay and Calcutta; it was close to Simla, the summer capital of the Raj, which would reduce the cost of the annual transhumance; and it was well served – for both provisions and military power – by six major railway lines. But far more alluring than all of that, there was the meaning of Delhi.32

  If Bombay was a city of the future, Delhi was about the past – in particular, the imperial past. ‘Delhi is the Empress of Indian cities,’ wrote G. W. Forrest, ex-director of records for the government of India, in 1903.

  She has often been sacked and left naked and desolate. But she could not be despoiled of the incomparable situation which marks her for the metropolis of a great Empire … Scattered over this wild stretch of land are surviving ruins, remnants of mighty edifices, tombs of warriors and saints, which convey a more impressive sense of magnificence than Imperial Rome. They are memorials not of a single city but of supplanted nations.33

  Unlike the other Garden City capitals of the British Empire – most notably Australia’s Canberra and South Africa’s Pretoria – Delhi was the very opposite of a tabula rasa. Indeed, her lineage as the ancient city of Indraprastha stretched back millennia to the age of the Pandavas, as chronicled in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata and as testified by the still-standing Purana Qila fort. Even more powerfully, Delhi had ruled India as the centre first of Hindustan and then the Mughal Empire right up until 1857. Shahjahanabad, the walled city now known as Old Delhi, was built by the fifth Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, and opened as his capital in 1648 – this was the glisteningly seductive, imperial cityscape of the Red Fort, the Jama Masjid mosque and Humayun’s Tomb.* As King George put it to the Delhi Municipal Council in December 1911, ‘The traditions of your City invest it with a peculiar charm. The relics of the dynasties of by-gone ages that meet the eye on every side, the splendid palaces and temples which have resisted the destroying hand of time, all these witness to a great and illustrious past.’34

  In short, Delhi had a magnetic effect for empires; it was ‘still a name to conjure with’, thought Lord Hardinge. So, ‘to the Mahomedans it would be a source of unbounded gratification to see the ancient capital of the Mughals restored to its proud position as the seat of the Empire’, he explained in a memo to the secretary of state for India. ‘The change would strike the imagination of the people of India as nothing else could, would send a wave of enthusiasm throughout the country and would be accepted by all as an assertion of an unfaltering determination to maintain British rule in India.’ Secretary of State Lord Crewe concurred. He thought that the ancient walls of Delhi had a tradition comparable ‘with that of Rome itself’ and that the Indian mind, so addled by legend and myth, would read the transfer of power to Delhi as a ‘promise [of] the permanence of British sovereign rule over the length and breadth of the country. Historical reasons will thus prove to be political reasons of deep importance and of real value in favour of the proposed change’.35

  Delhi was also a place of more recent history: it was at Delhi Ridge in 1857 that the Mutiny was reversed and the Empire in India saved. The siege of Delhi was, in William Dalrymple’s phrase, the Raj’s Stalingrad, with the seat of the Mughal emperor serving as both the principal centre of the uprising and then the setting for some of the worst excesses of British military vengeance in the aftermath of victory.36 Old Delhi was sacked and looted, whilst the exquisite Mughal architecture of the Red Fort was flattened to make way for a line of barracks (which still mar the courtyards and gardens some 150 years later). This was a city which witnessed one of the most dramatic and ugly reassertions of Empire within British India, the triumphalism of which was only augmented by the durbar pageants of 1877, 1903 and 1911. The psychology was obvious: the British ruled as the natural inheritors of the Mughal tradition, by might in 1857 and by right in 1911.

  Within the imperial establishment, there was only one discordant voice. Of course, Lord Curzon was angry with the reversal of his policy of dividing Bengal and greatly resented the flight from Calcutta:

  I have a very warm feeling for Calcutta myself. It has always seemed to me to be a worthy capital and expression of British rule in India. It is English built, English commerce has made it the second city in the Empire … and from the offices of the Government in Calcutta English statesmen, administrators, and generals have built up to its present commanding height the fabric of British rule in India.

  Yet as the viceroy who had urged the righteousness of Empire be carved in granite, one might have thought that he would have supported the grandeur of a new city erected on one of India’s ancient capitals. Not a bit of it. He interpreted the lessons of history differently. ‘I do not deny the glamour of the name of Delhi or the stories that cling about its dead and forgotten cities,’ he warily
informed the House of Lords. ‘But if we want to draw happy omens for the future the less we say about the history of Delhi the better. Of course, there were capitals there before it, but all have perished, one after another.’ Curzon thought the city’s ‘mass of deserted ruins and graves’ was a fateful testimony to ‘the mutability of human greatness’.37

  Though Delhi’s history was a powerful imperial aphrodisiac, the designers of New Delhi were not interested in updating the past. ‘We are building a new city,’ explained the British Architect journal.

  A great imperial city from whence to hold and secure the roots of Empire. We are not going to trifle with the old Delhi of the Chandni Chowk and its jewellers, the weird, wonderfully streeted maze of crenellated caravanserai and picturesque squalor, dominated by piled fort and dull-red musjeed … We are Britons, the tombs and temples of alien faiths, though of unspeakable charm and lofty, dreamful beauty, do not concern us as builders.38

  Instead, the vision was to build an entirely new city, which implicitly aligned itself with Delhi’s imperial Mughal heritage but also constituted a modern, Western, civilized contrast to the decay and disarray of Shahjahanabad. As such, it marked the final fulfilment of a system of city planning in India which had developed since 1857. As we have seen in Calcutta and Bombay, there had long existed civic divisions between the White Towns and Black Towns, between the European and indigenous Indian quarters. But in the aftermath of the Mutiny, when, as Rudyard Kipling had urged in ‘Beyond the Pale’, one must let ‘the White go to the White and the Black to the Black’, the spatial apartheid of the colonial city became all the more obvious. Whether it was dressed up under sanitary legislation or security, an ideology of distance produced urban plans predicated upon Military Cantonment, ‘Civil Lines’ (where the European civilians lived) and bungalow compounds. The Europeans retreated from the native city to spacious, green and well-guarded stations as racial segregation dictated the living patterns of ruler and ruled. The cosmopolitanism of Bombay was abandoned for the ritual and hierarchy of the later Raj. In Lucknow and Allahabad, a form of ‘death-dealing Haussmannising’ (as the town planner Patrick Geddes called it) was enacted as the old cities were demolished, boulevards cut through the native quarters, military cantonments erected in the urban core, and the British officials bunkered down behind the Civil Lines. In post-Mutiny Delhi, the same logic had been at work. Great swathes of the city were cleared, with mosques, shrines, Mughal palaces and 80 per cent of the Red Fort demolished – the remnants were transformed into ‘Delhi Fort’, a massive military cantonment in the midst of the old city. With Delhi now little more than a military camp, the Europeans headed north-west to the growing suburbs of Civil Station beyond the city walls. The destruction of Old Delhi and the white flight were a useful reminder that behind all of the British Empire’s Ornamentalist social hierarchy, of princes and pageants chained together in a multiracial caste system, there sat the urban reality of racial supremacy.39