Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  If New Delhi was indeed to be a distinct development separate from Old Delhi, the question was where to put it. A committee of experts, peopled by British architects and engineers and chaired by Captain Swinton of the London County Council, was given the task of finding the spot. Coronation Park, to the north of Delhi, was rejected on health and drainage grounds; construction among the European community within the Civil Lines was deemed too disruptive; and appropriating the Sabzi Mandi district would upset the industrialists. Instead, the committee mounted their elephants and headed south of Shahjahanabad to find a suitable location amid fauna of all description: ‘buck of all sorts, baboons, monkeys, jackals, hare, porcupine, water snakes, great fish, great tortoise which eat babies, snake, bats, flying fox, vultures, weird birds and many lovely ones’, as one member put it.40 Near the village of Malcha, the committee thought it had found the perfect spot. But Viceroy Hardinge was not convinced. ‘The moment I saw the selected site I realized its objections. It would be hot; it had no views; and it had no room for expansion … I told the assembled staff that I would rather not build a new capital at all than build it on that site.’ So Hardinge commandeered a horse and ‘galloped over the plain to a hill [Raisina] some distance away. From the top of the hill there was a magnificent view embracing old Delhi and all the principal monuments situated outside the town, with the River Jumma [sic] winding its way like a silver streak in the foreground at a little distance. I said at once … “This is the site for Government House.”’41 Forcibly relocating the 300 Indian families of Raisina and Malcha was also a lot easier than rehousing the officer class of the Civil Lines.

  Just as crucial as finding the site was the appointment of an architect. From Dublin to Melbourne, the British Empire had asserted its colonial vision through the civic fabric of its cities: this was the canvas upon which the ideology of Empire could be painted. In architectural styling, city planning and urban iconography the shifting meanings of the imperial project were explored. Both the virgin soil of New Delhi and its development amid such fraught introspection about the nature of Empire placed the significance of the city’s design on an altogether higher plane. ‘We are endeavouring to place before the peoples of India our distinctive British ideals, and to adapt to their use the principles of government on which British power has thriven,’ suggested The Times. ‘The new capital has been decreed to carry on and consolidate those aims, and it should bear the impress of them in stones.’42 Lord Stamfordham, private secretary to King George V, thought it a golden opportunity to show the Indians, amid their ancient imperial capital, ‘the power of Western science, art and civilization’. But again and again, it was the memory of an earlier empire – in the legends and history of which they had been immersed since their earliest days at public school and then university – which seemed to haunt the British imperial mind. ‘It is not a cantonment we have to lay out at Delhi,’ argued the India Office’s Sir George Birdwood, ‘but an Imperial City – the symbol of the British Raj in India – and it must like Rome be built for eternity.’43

  Luckily, New Delhi’s lead architect was a man brimming with colonial self-confidence. Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens was born in London in 1869 and learned his craft at the National Art Training School in South Kensington before taking articles in the practice of Ernest George and Peto. But his real inspiration was drawn from the Arts and Crafts style of Richard Norman Shaw and Philip Webb. In the 1890s, he joined forces with the grande dame of British landscape gardening, Gertrude Jekyll, to design a series of Surrey and Home Counties houses which made his name as a domestic architect in the English vernacular tradition. His reputation was further enhanced by his work on Henrietta Barnett’s model village of Hampstead Garden Suburb – which stood in relation to Hampstead village as New Delhi would to Old Delhi. Lutyens’s contribution, most notably his churches and the Central Square, fitted well with the low-density, tree-lined retreat laid out by Raymond Unwin as part of a conscious rejection of the filthy, stinking, overcrowded rookeries of London. In 1912 Lutyens was asked to join the expert committee on finding the New Delhi site, and in January 1913 he was appointed architect. It had not harmed his chances of preferment that his wife was Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton, daughter of the late viceroy.44

  Lutyens saw his purpose as nothing less than rescuing architecture in India – first of all from the Indians. ‘Personally, I do not believe there is any real Indian architecture or any great tradition,’ he wrote to Lady Emily during his initial tour of India in 1912. ‘They are just spurts by various mushroom dynasties with as much intellect in them as any other art nouveau.’ The Mughal court in Delhi was ‘all tommy rot’. And as for the Hindu tradition, ‘Hindon’t I say. It is not architecture – the best just clever children, though I own to some of their detail being beautiful.’45 Secondly, it had to be rescued from the British. Because just as bad were those Bombay Gothic or Indo-Saracenic monstrosities, designed by Scott and Stevens, which had sprung up during the second half of the nineteenth century. For Lutyens and his followers, the Victoria Terminus was not the central building of the British Empire but a grotesque ‘half-caste’ of architectural forms. ‘I do want old England to stand up and plant her great traditions and good taste where she goes and not pander to sentiment and all this silly Moghul-Hindu stuff.’46 Despite his occasional reactionary outbursts (‘India – like Africa – makes one very Tory and pre-Tory Feudal!’), it would be a mistake to regard Lutyens as a chauvinist.47 Rather, he was an aesthete with an absolute conviction that the architectural principles of classicism should just as well be applied to the plains of Delhi as the estates of Surrey.

  To temper Lutyens’s absolutism, Lord Hardinge appointed Herbert Baker to design the city’s Secretariat buildings. Baker was the most dependable of British imperial architects, schooled for the task by Cecil Rhodes himself. Baker’s initial commission for the Cape prime minister was his official residence, Groote Schuur, after which Rhodes packed him off on a study tour of Europe with a remit to introduce the classical tradition into imperial African architecture. Classical design, Rhodes thought, could give visible expression to imperialism and draw men into its purpose. The fruits of Baker’s indoctrination can still be seen, at the base of Table Mountain’s Devil Peak, in the Rhodes Memorial, modelled as an open Doric colonnade in the form of a Greek Temple. After Cape Town, Baker moved to Pretoria and, with the patronage of Jan Smuts, was awarded the design for the Union Buildings of the now self-governing Union of South Africa. This time, the Athenian Acropolis served as inspiration for a vast government edifice which, with its columned loggias and self-aggrandizing blocks with twin towers (symbolizing the ‘two races of South Africa’ – British and Dutch), was an obvious precursor to his New Delhi designs.

  Baker, much more than Lutyens, was personally committed to the civilizing mission of the British Empire and instantly realized the magnitude of New Delhi. ‘It is a question of Imperial as well as of artistic importance,’ he wrote to The Times in October 1912, in something of a job application, ‘as an event in the history of architecture it may be perhaps compared to the building of Constantinople.’48 Since the purpose of architecture was to express the ideals of Empire, the question of style was a relatively simple one. ‘It must not be Indian, nor English, nor Roman, but it must be Imperial. In 2000 years there must be an Imperial Lutyens tradition in Indian architecture, as there now clings a memory of Alexander.’49 The defining attribute of British imperial rule, thought Baker, was the imposition of ‘order, progress and freedom within the law’, which then allowed the flourishing of each national civilization ‘on the lines of their own tradition and sentiment’.50 The British imperial genius was its ability to coalesce the chaos of castes, races and religions under the beneficent suzerainty of the Crown. What the design of New Delhi had to do was capture that ‘spirit of British sovereignty’ in ‘stone and bronze’. ‘The new capital must be the sculptural monument of the good government and unity which India, for the first time in its history, h
as enjoyed under British rule. British rule in India is not a mere veneer of government and culture. It is a blend of the best elements of East and West.’51 On a personal level, as an old friend of Lutyens’s, Baker was delighted with the chance to collaborate with him on the capital. Yet mindful of his friend’s ‘wilful masterfulness’, he also ‘foresaw that, in spite of our long friendship, there might be troubles ahead when we came to collaborate in the sensitive realms of art’.52

  ‘In spite of our long friendship, there might be troubles ahead.’ Sir Herbert Baker and Sir Edwin Lutyens on an elephant (1913).

  If the relationship between Lutyens and Baker did not provide enough potential for creative conflict, there were also the views of Lord Hardinge himself to take into account. To Lutyens’s aestheticism and Baker’s imperialism, the viceroy pushed for some form of Indo-Saracenic design as a mark of respect to Indian sensibilities. In the light of the partition violence and the conciliatory Morley-Minto reforms of 1909, Hardinge didn’t want New Delhi to appear too triumphalist. Its architecture had to make some allowance to indigenous culture as part of a Curzon-like ambition to present British rule in India as an organic outcome of the nation’s history. To that end, Hardinge appointed Sir Swinton Jacob, the leading Indianist architect, whose Albert Hall Museum in Jaipur was a classic of Indo-Saracenic design, as a planning consultant. All of this interference and politicking drove Lutyens to distraction: ‘The Viceroy changes his mind every time I see him,’ he fumed to Lady Emily. ‘I am afraid he will make work very difficult … all he will think about [is] what the place will look like in three years time. Three hundred is what I think of … This is the building of an imperial city!’53

  DOME, TOWER, DOME, TOWER, DOME

  Out of this cauldron of political and architectural ambition, a scheme for New Delhi emerged. ‘Delhi is to be an Imperial capital and is to absorb the traditions of all the ancient capitals,’ concluded the Final Report of the Delhi Town Planning Committee (1913). ‘It is to be the seat of the Government of India. It has to convey the idea of a peaceful domination and dignified rule over the traditions and life of India by the British Raj.’54 In planning terms, Lutyens achieved this through a remarkable combination of both hexagonal road patterns, linking governmental, commercial and leisure activities with the residential areas, and grand boulevards. The most impressive was Kingsway (now Rajpath), which connected the Viceroy’s House, through the middle of the North and South Block Secretariats, down to the All India War Memorial (now India Gate), with the King George V cupola behind it. The Queensway (Janpath) intersected it at right angles to provide a direct route to the shopping hub of Connaught Place from the bungalow compounds of York Road (Motilal Nehru Marg). In this respect, New Delhi was the culmination of all the Wide Street Commissions since Dublin in the 1760s – here were boulevards of stupendous width, complete with the kind of vistas and dramatic sweeps every colonial administrator longed for. The avenues heightened the sense of New Delhi’s modernity and rationality (‘the power of Western science, art and civilization,’ in Lord Stamfordham’s words), by accentuating the contrast with Old Delhi. In streetscape and axial intersections, the ability of Empire to impose order on chaos was reaffirmed. Not only were the roads straight and broad, with their symmetry and size affirming the legitimacy of Britain’s imperial claim, but their horizons ended with the crumbling monuments and lost glories of Shahjahanabad. The line of Parliament Street (Sansad Marg) concluded at the Jama Masjid mosque; the central vista of Kingsway would have reached the ancient fort of Purana Qila if it had proceeded as initially planned. Under the historic shadow of the empress of cities, the contrast of old and new was all the sharper.55

  Embedded within the New Delhi scheme were all sorts of town planning philosophies accumulated over previous centuries. Most obviously, there was the inspiration of Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s design for Washington, DC, with its diagonal roads bifurcated by north–south and east–west streets, as well as the grand avenues of the National Mall and Pennsylvania Avenue, connecting Congress to the White House. There was the more contemporaneous City Beautiful or Beaux Arts influence, which would come to remodel the south side of Chicago in the interwar years along similarly monumental lines to New Delhi, with landmarks, vistas and broad, tree-lined avenues. This was certainly the inspiration for those other notable imperial cities erected at the same time – Canberra in Australia and Pretoria in South Africa – but there the dull governmentality and architectural self-importance managed to suffocate any of the more inventive elements of the Beaux Arts school. By contrast, New Delhi succeeded by drawing on Lutyens’s other roots in the Garden City tradition. Even on the scale of this imperial city, Lutyens’s designs managed to add some of the playfulness and intimacy, the characterfulness and humanity, which Henrietta Barnett had demanded in Hampstead Garden Suburb. And then, of course, there was the extraordinary greenery which still envelops New Delhi in a cool canopy: to counter the furnace-like urbanity of Old Delhi, Lutyens planted 10,000 trees (laburnum, gulmohar, jacaranda and Asok), over 100 kilometres of hedges and bushes of bougainvillea and well-tended plant beds to ease the heat island and provide a very English, rus in urbe naturalism of which Gertrude Jekyll would surely have approved. This was the striking originality of New Delhi – a compelling combination of Garden City and Beaux Arts, domestic architecture and urban monumentalism in the most difficult of settings.56

  Edwin Lutyens, ‘Imperial Delhi: Layout Plan from Government House to Purana Qila’ (detail).

  Yet New Delhi’s real success lay not in the plan, but in the buildings that populated it. The transcendent genius of the city’s architecture is found in Lutyens’s decision to meet Hardinge on his own terms, offering a new interpretation of the classical tradition upon Indian soil. ‘Like all humanists, Sir Edwin Lutyens had drunk of the European past, and he now drank of the Indian,’ as Robert Byron put it. ‘In so doing, he has accomplished a fusion between East and West … he has made of them a unity, and invested it with a double magnificence.’57 Or, as Lutyens himself phrased it:

  East and West can and do meet, with mutual respect and affection … There are two ways of building in India, one to parade your building in fancy dress … or to build as an Englishman dressed for the climate, conscious only that your tailor is of Agra or Benares, and not of Savile Row or Petticoat Lane.58

  Lutyens retained his horror for gauche Indo-Saracenic designs and never accepted that early Hindu architecture could be aped, but his initial condescension faded as he came to realize the impossibility of building in India without drawing upon indigenous designs and motifs. He also started to appreciate the particular demands which the climate placed upon the urban architecture – the need for shade, ventilation, flowing water and use of certain materials. As Byron describes it, ‘while holding fast to the first principles of humanist architecture, line, proportion, and mass, he discovered, from the Mogul builders, how those principles might be adapted to a land whose natural conditions necessitate their modification’.59

  So, into Lutyens’s designs crept the red sandstone of Fatehpur Sikri and the cream stone of Agra, the overhanging cornice to block the sun and monsoon rains (chujja); the Rajasthani latticed marble window which admitted air but not sunshine (jali); and the miniature roof pavilion (chattri). The playful Mughal, Hindu and Buddhist traditions of Indian design – as well as a characterful oriental iconography of lions, snakes, elephants, crescents and lotus-blossoms – can be seen in the defining edifices of Lutyens’s Delhi: the bungalows, princely palaces, the All India War Memorial, the King George V pedestal and, designed by Baker, the Council House. Today, the Council House is Parliament House – a mix of the Roman and the Mughal, with Coliseum-like corridors that encircle the two Legislative Assemblies (decorated with ornate curved jalis along the veranda walls) and provide a perfect setting for gossiping, plotting parliamentarians. There are memories of Britain in the green carpet of the Lok Sabha, akin to that in the House of Commons, and the more lordly
red of the Rajya Sabha. Look carefully and you can find copies of the Westminster procedural bible, Erskine May, on the clerks’ table and ‘Fried Fish (with chips)’ for lunch in the canteen.