Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  Yet even the Council House pales in comparison with Lutyens’s masterpiece, the Viceroy’s House. Robert Byron could hardly contain his admiration – ‘so arresting, so unprecedented, so uninviting of comparison with known architecture’. What he particularly admired was its instant monumentality – ‘it seems not to have been built, but to have been poured compact from a mould, impermeable to age, destined to stand for ever, to watch the rise of an eighth Delhi and a hundredth Delhi’.60 Lutyens and his extensive team of predominantly Sikh engineers and builders worked on the house for seventeen years (finally handing it over in 1929), and it represented the pinnacle of both his domestic and imperial architectural career. Perhaps it is the sheer scale, the still thunderous enormity of the building, which remains so startling to the eye. Larger than the Palace of Versailles, the façade runs 192 metres, while the residence contained 340 rooms including the circular, neo-classical temple of the Durbar Hall and a state dining room some 30 metres long. Pamela Mountbatten, daughter of the last viceroy, was terrified by the immensity of the house and thought the place made ‘no sense whatever but just consists of vast corridors leading nowhere’.61 However, Lutyens never allowed its enormity to undermine precision, as he applied all the refined luxury of the Palladian country house tradition to the furniture, panelling, woodwork and upholstery. He thought about the people who would live here and put particular effort into the nursery and drawing rooms, hoping to offer a familiar Home Counties aesthetic amidst the alien Delhi heat. The viceroy’s vast gardens – some 360 metres by 180 metres – were a further testament to the double magnificence of East and West, combining the Mughal tradition of cascading water-channels, fountains and pools with Gertrude Jekyll’s broad-brushed Surrey planting. Lutyens was proud of the fact that the Viceroy’s House and garden was most definitely ‘a gentleman’s house’, but also profoundly original ‘in that it is built in India, for India, Indian’.62

  He instinctively understood, however, that this building was more than some expansive domestic commission. Perched on the top of Raisina Hill, complete with bells hewn from stone so they would never be able to ring the death-knell of Empire, it was also meant to stand as the ne plus ultra of British colonial certainty. It was a calling Lutyens sought to signify in the vast dome which crowned the Viceroy’s House, combining the Roman Pantheon with the Mughal and Buddhist traditions, and unequivocally demonstrating British technical achievement. ‘The dome stood at the heart of the Indian Empire as a palpable reminder of British sovereignty,’ in the words of historian Robert Grant Irving.63 The Viceroy’s House now surely took the place of Bombay’s VT as the central building of the British Empire.

  In front of it were Sir Herbert Baker’s two Secretariat buildings, North and South Block, home to that ‘kingdom of magistrates’, the highest echelons of the Indian Civil Service. The gradient at which the blocks straddled Raisina Hill was the subject of a furious spat with Lutyens since the route’s dramatic steepness obscured the view of the Viceroy’s House from the Kingsway. Lutyens complained to Lady Emily that he had met his ‘Bakerloo’ – ‘he [Baker] has designed his levels so that you will never see Government House at all (!) from the Great Place. You will see [only] the top of the dome! He is so obstinate and quotes the Acropolis at Athens, which is in no way parallel.’64 In style, however, the Secretariat was a perfect complement, representing Baker’s finest attempt at an imperial architecture blending the best elements of East and West. The open veranda, the chujja and jalis, the water gardens, were all corralled under an architecture of beautiful symmetry and classical precision, giving the Secretariat something of the cloistered calm of an Oxbridge college combined with the Mughal styling of the Taj Mahal. Here were housed the Indian government’s departments of state; here was where the White Man’s Burden was shouldered. ‘Liberty does not descend to a people. A people must raise themselves to liberty. It is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed,’ read an accompanying placard. To emphasize the point, four Dominion Columns representing Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada were erected between the North and South Block, to indicate the long road which India would have to travel before it was granted full self-government. This was a landscape of imperial theatre – a place of processions, pageants and self-regard. When the historian and wartime intelligence operative Hugh Trevor-Roper visited in 1944, he was overcome with the imperial ambition of New Delhi. ‘A fantastic growth, it seemed to me … a style without ancestry, without posterity, an architectural sport; and I compared it, according to my varying mood, now with the Pyramids of Egypt, now with the great statues of Easter Island, now with the megaliths of Avebury or Stonehenge.’ In the end, Trevor-Roper tellingly reached for his copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to understand the achievement. ‘All the same, as my eye sought to comprehend that great pink and white symmetry of palaces and pagodas, fountains and obelisks, ornamental ponds and regal statues, I couldn’t help thinking of those Roman magnificos of whom Gibbon wrote, who “were not afraid to show that they had the spirit to conceive, and the wealth to execute, the most grandiose designs”.’65

  For Sir Herbert Baker, New Delhi signalled the end point of the Indian capital’s epic history: that long past of Indraprastha and Shahjahanabad, of risen and fallen empires captured in a cityscape of tombs and mosques, all culminated with the construction of British Delhi. Delhi, a city of the past, had met its destiny. Part of the reason he was so adamant about the gradient of Raisina Hill was because of his vision of future British imperialists stepping out on to the veranda of the Secretariat and lifting up their hearts ‘over the far ruinous sites of the historic cities of the Hindu and Mahommedan dynasties to the new Capital beneath them that unites for the first time through the centuries all races and religions of India’.66

  MODERN MUGHALS

  What was it to live amid all this monumentalism? We catch a glimpse from the diary of twenty-something Viola Bayley, married to a Delhi police superintendent in the dying days of the Raj. In the winter of 1936, the Bayleys attended a ceremonial ball to welcome the new viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, to his capital. ‘For sheer pageantry, it could hardly have been equalled,’ Bayley recalled.

  The dinner was held in an immense shamiana, a marquee of the most magnificent order, in the gardens of Viceroy’s House. I suppose we must have sat down several hundred strong with almost as many khitmagars in red and gold standing behind our chairs … Jewels flashed in every direction, from diadems in turbans, from ear-rings and necklaces. The difficulty was not to stare too hard. It was the most fantastic and Arabian-night-like scene that one could have witnessed.67

  The paradox of New Delhi was that, as Viola Bayley depicted it and Robert Byron described it, the city was ‘a slap in the face of the modern, average man’, but it was also an intensely modernist project. The most up-to-date theorems of town planning, transport management, landscape architecture and City Beautiful styling were transplanted on to one of the most ancient sites of India. ‘It all runs according to plan with great vistas and arches, parks and roundabouts and looks lovely at night with some of the buildings lit up,’ thought Pamela Mountbatten. The contrast with ‘colourful, crowded, smelly’ Old Delhi was all the starker.68 New Delhi was a place of cars, shopping, telephone lines and technology. This was where the modern Empire was to be ruled from with all the appendages of an industrial, Western state on display. It was as true for retail as administrative life, with Connaught Place ‘Army and Navy’ style shops specifically designed for a shut-off ICS cadre shuttled about in chauffeured cars, in contrast to the fluid bazaars and street life of Old Delhi. To accentuate that contrast – between colonial modernity and indigenous, oriental decay – the city of Old Delhi was progressively starved of investment. As energy and water, manpower and resources were poured into the blossoming Garden City, Shahjahanabad was left to crumble. Old Delhi’s population density multiplied, death rates climbed, infant mortality accelerated, and infrastructure frayed. The legendary De
lhi of Mughal beauty and sophistication – a city renowned across civilizations for its architecture, poetry, visual arts and literature – was now identified with filth, backwardness and superstition. The British project of urban colonialism, of developing an imperial hegemony through the assertion of cultural and geographical modernity, was advancing with apparently unstoppable success.69

  Yet it was precisely that reviled civilization, the ethos of sixteenth-century Shahjahanabad and the durbar pageants of the Mughal Court (Viola Bayley’s ‘Arabian Nights’ excess), which dictated official life in New Delhi. In its hierarchy, ritual, vanity and snobbery all the caricatures of oriental luxury were resuscitated under the British viceroy. There were no democratic or social advances to match the modernity of the motor car and telephone. Instead, New Delhi was a stage-set for a perpetual social durbar, amid the most up-to-date building styles and interior decor. Highly stratified principles of order and deference, as refracted through the occupational, social and racial criteria of New Delhi’s official class, were reflected in the allocation of housing.

  A Versailles-like system of social decorum was set out by the Warrant of Precedence, which listed the 175 colonial roles in descending order of social significance, beginning with the viceroy and ending up with the assistant chief controller of stores and superintendent of central jails. With ancien régime precision, each individual’s status within the New Delhi hierarchy was classified and their housing allocated accordingly. What is now known as the Lutyens Bungalow Zone was carved up between the officials and soldiers, the clerks and elites of the British Empire as colonial couples went to war over compound acreage, servants’ quarters and proximity to power. A Member of Council could expect to receive a decent 6-acre site, in contrast to Members of the Legislature, who were merely democratically elected representatives, and who had to make do with bungalows on a quarter acre. A clear pattern of social and racial segregation, of a caste hierarchy topped by European superiority, was laced through the New Delhi grid with the British elite huddled close to the Secretariat around York Place, Hastings Road, King George’s Avenue and Dupleix Road and the Indian clerks and peons were despatched to the urban edges. Only the richest and grandest of Indian princes, notably the Nizam of Hyderabad, were able to break the racial barrier and embed themselves within the inner circle. Lutyens himself designed Hyderabad House with a restrained display of East-West humanism, and other, competing maharajas sought to insert themselves into the colonial geography. For the vast majority of Indians, however, New Delhi was testament to the Empire’s racial apartheid, cocooning an elite ruling class in as gilded a setting as any ancient, Mughal court.70

  ‘How often, while at Delhi, I thought of [Marcel] Proust and wished that he might have known the place and its inhabitants,’ wrote Aldous Huxley after a brief stop-off in New Delhi in 1926. ‘For the imperial city is no less rich in social comedy than Paris; its soul is as fertile in snobberies, dissimulations, prejudices, hatred, envies.’71 The stage set for such snobberies and envies was the legion of clubs and societies which the British, with their innate genius for sport and drinking, populated the new capital (as they had in Hong Kong). There was the Gymkhana Club and the Chelmsford, the Delhi Hunt and the Annual Flower Show, the Imperial Horse Show and the Annual All-India Polo Tournament, the cricket club and golf club – as well as the clubs for high-ranking Indians such as the New Delhi Club, the Municipal Club and the Chartered Bank Club. The institutions codified the rigid, structured, stifling patterns of the Raj. ‘Life was very formal,’ remembered Viola Bayley.

  Winifred and I would be driven out to the shops or to pay calls in the morning, for which, even if only a shopping expedition, one wore hat and gloves … After tea, unless one had been taken to watch polo, there was possibly a stroll round the race-course that lay beyond the garden or a visit to the club library.72

  The formality of it all appalled Huxley. ‘From the Viceroy to the young clerk, who, at home, consumes high tea at sunset, every Englishman in India solemnly “dresses”. It is as though the integrity of the British Empire depended in some directly magical way upon the donning of black jackets and hard-boiled shirts.’73 Accompanying the uniform came the same obsession about hierarchy and protocol which had dictated housing allocations: the Warrant of Precedence dictated not just the bungalows, but which couples were invited to what parties and who sat where. Women, ‘unless by virtue of holding an appointment themselves they are entitled to a higher position in the table,’ were always allotted a place in the seating plan entirely dependent upon their husband’s Warrant status. And, more often than not, the dinner-parties and cocktail sets were made up of the same tight circle of civil servants, officers and diplomats. Pamela Mountbatten found it all a dreadful bore – the city had no atmosphere; the people were desperately artificial. ‘I went to the most extraordinary cocktail party given by Lady Tymms full of horrifying specimens and swarms of the huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’ type who bombarded me with indignant demands as to why I hadn’t been out with the hounds every morning since my arrival,’ she wrote, four months before her father handed it all over to Nehru.74

  Others enjoyed the last days of the Raj with more abandon. ‘The atmosphere was too giddy,’ recalled Iris Portal, daughter of the Indian Civil Service mandarin Sir Montagu Butler and future historian of India. ‘It was all riding, picnics, dancing, dashing young men, and beautiful polo players.’ Among these was her husband, the British army officer Gervas Portal.75 ‘During the so-called cold-weather season in Delhi, life is just one whirl of gaiety,’ explained a visitor in 1933. ‘Horse Show week is particularly marvellous. Balls, picnics, and parties; visitors come from miles around … Indian princes bringing magnificent jewels leave their native states to add splendour to Delhi.’76 Huxley was bowled over by the sheer extravagance of the princes. ‘The hotels pullulated with despots and their viziers. At the Viceroy’s evening parties the diamonds were so large that they looked like stage gems; it was impossible to believe that the pearls in the million-pound necklaces were the genuine excrement of oysters. How hugely Proust would have enjoyed the Maharajas!’77

  As Huxley intimated, the pinnacle of New Delhi society could only be glimpsed at the Durbar Hall and in the State Dining Room of Lutyens’s Viceroy’s House. But there, protocol was everything, from the wearing of sixteen-button, white kid-gloves to the act of homage to the king’s representative. ‘Dinner at Viceroy’s House was a rather awe-inspiring affair, particularly the custom of dropping a full curtsey to the Viceroy as the ladies left the dining-room,’ Viola Bayley recalled. ‘Even less exalted dinners were very formal, great care being given to precedence.’78 This Mughal Palace of British India could draw on a staff of 6,000 servants and an entertainment budget unrivalled across the Empire. The future King Edward VIII once remarked that he had never known what authentic regal pomp really meant until he stayed at the Viceroy’s House. India was finally being ruled from a palace and not a counting house. And as at Louis XVI’s Versailles Palace, the obsession with precedent and formality provided a cover for the creeping sclerosis.79

  THE FALL OF ROME

  From its inception, New Delhi was overshadowed by the Recessional gloom of Indian independence. On his first state entry into the city as viceroy, Lord Hardinge had had a taste of the struggle to come. After arriving at Delhi railway station on 23 December 1912, Hardinge and his wife progressed on a caparisoned elephant towards the ancient Mughal seat of power, the Red Fort. When the procession arrived at the Punjab National Bank along the old Delhi thoroughfare of Chandni Chowk – that foreign Indian cityscape of ‘crenellated caravanserai and picturesque squalor’, as the British Architect journal put it – a needle bomb was thrown into the viceroy’s carriage (or howdah), killing his support staff and ripping an eight-inch gash in Hardinge’s back and neck. A Bengali terrorist group with close connection to the anti-colonialist movement was blamed for the bomb plot. At the foundation moment of the greatest city of Empire, the endgame of Empire
had begun.

  Over the next thirty years demands for independence became more insistent and more sophisticated. Congress-led campaigns of civil disobedience – ranging from boycotts to shutdowns to tax protests – were countered by the British with violence (as at the Amritsar Massacre of 1919), the jailing of Gandhi and Nehru and emergency laws. On the other hand, a series of reforms, beginning with provincial self-government, were also passed to enable India to pursue a pathway towards Dominion status. But the advent of the Second World War accelerated the timetable. Congress reacted with fury when the British viceroy peremptorily announced India’s entry into the war and initiated the ‘Quit India’ campaign in August 1942. Before the year was out, some 60,000 Indians had been jailed, 600 flogged and 900 reported killed.

  Oblivious to it all, New Delhi’s riding, dancing, cocktail-mixing durbar grandeur lasted until the final moments of the Raj and the birth of an independent India. Indeed, in Britain’s final viceroy, Rear Admiral Lord Mountbatten of Burma, the pageantry and vanity of imperial Delhi produced its most consummate figurehead. Very much a product of the Lytton-Curzon school of colonial showmanship, Mountbatten was determined to prove that the British could pass on a colony with dignity and élan. Before his flight into Delhi in March 1947, ‘he was chiefly concerned with what he should wear on arrival,’ according to his confidant Woodrow Wyatt.

  ‘They’re all a bit left wing, aren’t they? Hadn’t I better land in ordinary day clothes?’ He was delighted when I said, ‘No, you are the last Viceroy. You are royal. You must wear your grandest uniform and all your decorations and be met in full panoply and with all the works. Otherwise they will feel slighted.’ And that is what he did, to everyone’s pleasure.80