Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity
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The remnants of British rule are difficult to erase. Even in a region where I can guarantee that almost nobody knows who Bentinck was, and certainly nobody can pronounce his name.
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Colonial Amnesia: A Tale of Two Cities
On 5 October 2003, as the promise of another glorious winter began to dispel the heat of summer, forty-two Englishmen arrived in New Delhi. They were part of the Lutyens Trust Events Committee, and included six members of the Lutyens family, among them, his two great-grand-nephews, Charles and Derek. The visitors were accorded a welcome that far outstripped their expectations. Their impending arrival was heralded in the papers, and as Charles would later recall, ‘the media pounced on us as soon as we arrived’ 1 repeatedly wanting to know whether they thought India was properly looking after the work of their grand-uncle. The Indian Express photographed them in moonlight, standing ‘romantically’ against the backdrop of the Secretariat Buildings. Not to be outdone, the Hindustan Times showed ‘Charles between two lamps like a happy gnome between two toadstools’. 2 A little baffled by all this excitement, the Guardian ran a story back home on the tumult the Lutyens were creating.
The visitors were given a welcome by the rich and powerful befitting royalty. Abdul Kalam, the President of India, gave them tea at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Jagmohan, the minister of tourism and culture, hosted them for dinner. Amarinder Singh, the erstwhile Maharaja of Patiala, and the chairman of India’s apex heritage and conservation body, The Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), arranged a ‘magical evening’ at his palatial residence, personally moving around the candlelit tables so that his guests ‘take in the full joys of a balmy Delhi evening’. Shiela Dikshit, the chief minister of Delhi, was their host for a lunch at the Maurya Sheraton, where, as one of the group recalled, ‘the food was a choice mixture of western and Indian dishes and the four courses rather exceeded one’s normal luncheon intake, contributing perhaps to some uncharacteristic lethargy at the subsequent visit to Jaipur House’. 3 When the group visited Baroda House, originally designed by Lutyens as the residence of the Maharaja of Baroda, and now the headquarters of the Indian Railways, they were surprised to find ‘what seemed to be a fair proportion of the 1.6 million employees’ lined up in ‘a welcome committee on an imperial scale. We progressed past the smiling and waving hosts until at the entrance to the boardroom we were met by a party of beguiling flower ladies. Showered by rose petals and garlanded like Apollo, we were introduced to the top management of this vast enterprise’, after which ‘refreshments capable of satisfying the appetite of a regiment were circulated’. 4 Charles Lutyens was asked to speak, and he was so carried away that he even sang a song to thunderous applause.
On another evening they were given special permission to ‘dine and inspect that shrine of Imperial and now Indian respectability, the Delhi Gymkhana Club’, and noted that ‘the seamless continuation of club life throughout the radical changes in regime, culture and fashion of the past sixty years is a striking feature of all the major Indian cities’. 5 Their generous host, Bindu Manchanda, had arranged for a handsome meal under the open sky, and apparently had some problems extracting all of the party from the fulsome temptations of the bar. Their last day ‘devoted to the ecclesiastical manifestations of the Imperial spirit’ was topped by a dinner at the home of Mr and Mrs Shiban Ganju, and ‘excelled our most sanguine hopes’. It was a ‘sumptuous’ evening, where Delhi’s social elite jostled to talk to Lutyens’ nephews, and ‘drinks in amazing variety and amazing colours appeared and quickly disappeared’.
S.K. Mishra, a distinguished civil servant, and then the vice-chairman of INTACH, had worked hard to upgrade the visit of this delegation. He had also arranged a discussion at the prestigious India International Centre on Lutyens and the need to preserve the Lutyens Bungalow Zone (LBZ). An overflowing audience listened attentively to renowned architects and conservationists speak with fervent admiration of the great man’s legacy. Joginder Khurana, an architect trained at Harvard, compared Lutyens’ Delhi with L’Enfant’s Washington and Haussman’s Paris. Other participants spoke eloquently about how Lutyens worked to achieve a genuine synthesis between the east and the west and combine Indian craftsmanship with western architecture. His desire to relate the new city with the old was also mentioned. Dr Mervyn Miller, architectural adviser to the Lutyens Trust, lectured gravely on the subject of ‘Learning from Lutyens’, stressing his international stature, while another architect in the delegation, Charles Morris, lamented the fact that he had not seen many tourists, and advised Indians on the need to do more to project and promote the rich heritage of the iconic builder. The writer and conservation enthusiast Shobita Punja had specially produced for INTACH a book for schoolchildren. Titled A Capital Story, it told the story of the building of New Delhi, and was released on this occasion.
Edwin Lutyens, who had no doubts whatsoever about his own accomplishments, would have expected to be lauded and fêted. But even he would have been surprised at how the Indians, who outdid each other in paying homage to him and his legacy, could completely forget, or, inexplicably, be totally unaware of, his passionate contempt for them and their culture. After all, he had never made any attempt to hide his feelings. An unapologetic spokesman of British imperialism, he built the Viceroy’s Palace as a symbol of the glory of the Raj, and considered Indians to be primitives as yet on the verge of civilization who deserved to be ruled in perpetuity by the British. This assessment of the celebrated architect is not mere conjecture. In 1985, the publishing house Collins in London brought out a book, The Letters of Edwin Lutyens to his Wife Lady Emily. Edited by Clayre Percy and Jane Ridley, it is an unabashed and emphatic record of what Lutyens thought of India and Indians. 6 Lutyens was a prolific letter writer, so what we have before us is not the odd, stray comment, but an entire corpus of sustained racist denunciation.
It is important to refer to these letters in some detail, because the fact that they were written and published provides incontrovertible evidence of the views of this man, and by extension—given how he is venerated by many Indians—a graphic illustration of the kind of amnesia that afflicts the colonized. Nothing about India impressed Lutyens—not the architecture, not the philosophy, not the topography, not the music and dance, and certainly not the people. India’s greatest flaw, of course—and this is not to be glossed over—was the colour of its people. The ‘natives’ were ‘blacks’ and quite clearly beyond redemption. On arrival in 1912, and before he began to seriously work on his drawings, he took a tour across some parts of the country. Of a train journey from Delhi to Bombay, he had this to record: ‘Some fat blacks [had] occupied the only ladies carriage—and you mustn’t occupy a carriage they have used. They don’t know how to use the lavatory basins, and they use them for all sorts of purposes. The poorer nations they taught to use a WC by putting a looking glass in such a way [that] their irresistible curiosity compelled them to sit!’ 7 At Daly College at Indore he asked to meet the students, and described them as ‘dear little nigger chaps’. In Benares, while cruising down the Ganga on the Maharaja’s steamer, he primarily noticed ‘every sort of black body doing every sort of thing’. About the people of Madras he wrote: ‘But oh the people—the scallywags. Awful faces, to me degenerate, very dark, very naked, and awful habits of hair dressings. The bulk of the faces merely loony …’ 8 Back in Delhi at a state ball where some members of the Indian royalty were present, he observed that the rajas dressed well enough but they didn’t dance, ‘which is a pity, but the only possible solution to the horror of seeing a black man embrace a white woman’. 9
Apart from this racist arrogance, his views on the skills and abilities of the ‘natives’ were breathtakingly contemptuous. ‘The natives do not improve on acquaintance,’ he wrote. ‘They are children without the charm of heaven, and there seems a lot of carnal pleasure. And the caste rule rules out any broad line of Christianity.’ 10 Condescendingly he accepts that India could in some ways be amus
ing ‘but the low intellect of the natives spoils much and I do not think it possible for the Indians and whites to mix freely and naturally. They are very, very different and even my ultra wide sympathy with them cannot admit them on the same plane as myself … for one or the other to leave his place is unclean and unforgivable.’ 11 He was consumed with disgust for the country and its people—‘The average Indian seems a hopeless creature’—that left no place for understanding or accommodation. ‘I am not impressed by the intellectual sides of any religion I have seen here … the housing of people here seems extraordinarily unintelligent … the natives can do nothing without making a mess of it and have no idea of appliances, of economy or any sort of cleanliness … apart from their own bodies.’ 12 About his personal staff his dismissive take was that they were ‘various odd people with odd names who do all the things that bore the white man’. 13 When he visited the home of Rai Bishamber Nath, his engineer, he found his ‘host’s taste was appalling and of a mad child order’. The pictures in the house were ‘the most dreadful chromo prints of smirking women covered with a sort of small-pox of luster sequins to represent nose, ear and lip’. 14 Confronted with a Hindu idol he was revolted—‘terrible … a creature with four arms and as many legs’. Invited to a rich Hindu’s new house, he thought it ‘ugly and without charm’, and its owner ‘a yellow cringing Mephistopheles’ with a ‘fat podgy son who had been to England—Ugh! Dark and ill-smelling and glad-to-be-away place.’ 15 At another Indian’s home he thought the elaborate refreshments were ‘weird … very strange and frightening’, and when some were packed for him to take he gave them away to his servants.
The blind revulsion prevented Lutyens from assessing what was changing in India, and he maintained a narrow and very imperialist vision of the burgeoning freedom movement. For him, Indians deserved to be ruled by the British, not only because the British were a superior race but because the Indians were born inferior in every way and in need of civilization. In his letters he often refers to Indians as children, needing to be guided and incapable of doing anything constructive on their own. ‘The nationalist movement here,’ he reported to his wife in 1913, ‘is exactly as though the children of a nursery rose against their nurse.’ 16 Mirroring long-standing imperialist prejudices, he thought the Indian people were naturally submissive, and wished only for the ‘reinstatement of an Englishman’ as Resident. ‘Their tradition—clan against clan and treachery, a certain clever sliminess and vice … and it will be years before they are fit to govern themselves with any sense of justice or of fairness.’ 17 This supreme assumption of the right to rule could on occasion become vicious. Annoyed by what one of his minions had done, he fumes: ‘They ought to be reduced to slavery and not given the rights of man at all and beaten like brute beasts and shot like man eaters.’ 18 This from a man who could be blatantly fawning and obsequious with his British superiors. He once famously wrote to Viceroy Hardinge’s wife: ‘I will wash your feet with my tears and wipe them with my hair. True, I have very little hair, but then you have very little feet.’
Lutyens’ most vocal condemnation was about Indian architecture. ‘Personally I do not believe there is any real Indian architecture or any great tradition,’ he wrote. ‘They are just spurts by various mushroom dynasties with as much intellect in them as any other art nouveau … And then it is ultimately the building style of children.’ 19 He was convinced that anything at all redeemable in Indian architecture was due to the influence of the west, but even that was destroyed by the natives. ‘The Hindus knew little and the Moghuls little more of any ethic of construction and art in relation to them. The Moghuls took Italian forms and mutilated them.’ 20 The Mughal style of building was in his view little more than ‘cumbrous ill-constructed buildings covered with a veneer of stone and marble and very tiresome to the western intelligence’.
Not surprisingly, his comments were scathingly dismissive of almost all the architectural landmarks in India, displaying a complete lack of sensitivity to the lifestyles of other socio-cultural traditions. He ridiculed the beautifully carved throne in the Diwan-i-Khas of the Red Fort in Delhi because it would only allow a man to ‘squat cross-legged’. The exquisite panels in pietra dura of birds and animals he called ‘tommy rot’. The Indian technique of joining marble slabs was plain ‘nonsense’. About the Qutub he wondered, ‘Why should we throw away the lovely subtlety of a Greek column for this uncouth and careless and unknowing and unseeing shape?’ 21 The ancient city of Mandu in central India was to him ‘childish and quite inconsequent and built to destroy itself’, somewhat picturesque but ‘with no intellect’, good only for those ‘who wear no clothes and want no furniture … freakish monstrosities, ruthless and squalid with no real nicety’. 22 The Hindu temples and Buddhist shrines along the ghats in Benares appeared like ‘a cactus or children’s toy tree on a steep mountainside, decorated at the top with flags on crazy bamboo poles …’ 23 Holkar’s palace in Bombay was ‘very vulgar’, and the palace at Udaipur ‘barbaric’. The imposing Bikaner Fort was ‘a large barbaric pile with some good lacquer work and other decorations inside. Some of it was too awful for words. Gods, Goddesses, Kings carved and jewelled and painted—no gollywog could better it.’ 24 The Elephanta caves almost passed muster: ‘Rather wonderful and some evidence of real beauty,’ he conceded. ‘But how can you achieve beauty with a Ganesha …?’ 25
Even the magnificent Taj Mahal did not amount to much for this man. ‘People go head over heels with their admiration for the Taj,’ he lectured to his wife, ‘but compared to the great Greeks, Byzantines, Romans, even men of the caliber of Mansard, Wren etc, it is small but very costly beer, and alongside the Egyptians it is evanescent … The third dimension seems beyond [the natives’] philosophy and they never get beyond carpet patterns and their carpets … inspire their architecture.’ 26 The incandescent beauty of one of the wonders of the world on a full moon night left our finicky aesthete unmoved. The Taj by moonlight ‘becomes so bald and indefinite’, he wrote. ‘It is wonderful but not architecture … And so it is with all these Indian builders. Anything really admirable has been done by an Italian or a Chinaman. For the rest it is all pattern—just the same as any carpet hung up. The buildings are tents in stone and little more. Elaborated to howdahs, stone buildings which when put up are carved and carved and carved without any relation to the stone, its purpose or location. The Indians of today have no sense of construction decorated.’ 27 The denunciation allows for no inflection of doubt. It is consistently and categorically hostile. His basic premise is that India has no architecture worth the name, only ‘veneered joinery in stone, concrete and marble on a gigantic scale … but no real architecture and nothing is built to last, not even the Taj’. 28
The Indian craftsmen he was compelled to work with drove him to despair. There were painters from Bengal at work at the Viceroy’s Palace (now Rashtrapati Bhavan), but Lutyens felt that they could hardly draw. ‘They know only the most terrible patterns and those nerve wracking sodden gods and goddesses and to be mysterious and godlike you must draw everything wrong—foolishly methodless. Thank Very God of Very God that he wrought not our world on such lines …’ 29 When the furnishings were being done, he thought the French and English materials made ‘the Indian stuff and materials look silly’. As he inspected his handiwork in the finishing stages, he observed how ‘careless the Indians were … forever damaging things and the messes they make! Horrible!… And the Indian never finishes anything and breaks fifty per cent of what he temporarily fixes …’ 30 He wanted to buy a Buddha for his wife but nothing came up to par. ‘Lord, how ugly everything Indian and Anglo-Indian is …’ he despaired. He wanted to somehow educate Indian craftsmen, but felt the task was quite futile. ‘I feel sure it’s no use blunting one’s own sense of righteousness by stooping to the inefficiencies of an atrophied architecture.’ 31
In evidence here is a sweeping disdain, an implacable belief that his civilization is inherently superior, and undisguised contempt for �
��the natives’. Well into the twentieth century, this was a bit extreme even for diehard British imperialists. In a man outside of politics and trained in the arts, one would have expected to find some understanding, however small, of the culture of the country where he had come to work. But this was ruled out; Lutyens’ mind was closed. ‘I cannot allow the supremacy of the eastern over the western mind,’ he declared. ‘The Chinaman is an exception perhaps, but the Hindus and Muslims are mere children at the game.’ 32 This attitude influenced Lutyens’ work, of course, but also his interactions with Indians, even when they sometimes came from a background he approved. In a letter dated 27 February 1929, he recalls meeting ‘a Pandit Nehru’ at a party. This was Motilal Nehru, and since it appeared to Lutyens that Motilal was not without ‘some wit’, he invited him to lunch. From the description of what transpired, the repast was mostly a monologue by the host on the decline of Indian arts, and how ‘deplorably behind [the] times’ they were. The construction of the Viceroy’s Palace was essentially ‘an education to the Indian mason and craftsman’, he told his guest, who—apparently—confessed that this angle to Lutyens’ enterprise had not struck him. ‘The only live thing in India [is] half-baked statesmanship and agitation,’ declared the builder over coffee and port. It was a rather satisfying lunch, especially since Lutyens felt that Motilal was interested in what he said, and was, therefore, an agreeable kind of person. ‘He is a dear old man, drinks whisky, port etc, mutton, everything. A black coat and Jodhpurs on which I drew buttons so that he looked exactly like an English bishop. And that was all that he was fit for if he didn’t help India in her material world.’ 33