Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  Nothing of these racist sentiments, of the relentless hostility, was of any consequence to the group of influential Indians who laid out the red carpet for Lutyens’ grand-nephews. Nor to the speakers and architecture experts at the India International Centre who displayed much scholarship when they assessed and praised Lutyens’ work, but seemed oddly unaware of his thinking. Such is the nature of the amnesia that afflicts the formerly colonized. The victims are unable, even unwilling, to confront the fact of their own humiliation. They lose the ability to recall, and, even more important, to evaluate. An act of conscious forgiveness would be understandable, given the need to move beyond past acrimonies. But when genuflection is based on ignorance, and unthinking veneration of the white man’s legacy, there is need to introspect and ask some tough questions about ourselves.

  Edwin Lutyens, one of fourteen children of an Irish mother and an impecunious army captain turned artist, was born in 1869. Although he never completed his art school education, he was a talented architect and gave his career an early boost by marrying in 1889 Emily Lytton, the youngest daughter of the first Earl of Lytton, who was viceroy of India from 1876 to 1880. When he was selected in 1912 to plan the capital in Delhi, he had little experience of public buildings, except a few in South Africa. His specialization was in designing English country homes and gardens, and he had quite a fan following among the readers of Country Life. Vice president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, he was a pipe-smoking man about town, a member of the exclusive Athenaeum and Garrick Clubs, and on hobnobbing terms with the rich and smart set. In 1918, while he was building the Viceroy’s Palace in the new capital of British India, he was knighted.

  But his legacy wasn’t always uncritically celebrated in Britain. In the late 1960s his architectural reputation was severely questioned by many who thought that he was essentially the last of those schooled in the Roman tradition. Reviewing his work, a leading commentator wrote in the influential Architectural Review that he ‘contributed nothing whatsoever to the mainstream of development in 20th century architecture’. In 1968 the Royal Academy of Architecture could not raise more than £12,000 for a centenary exhibition and the project had to be dropped. His architectural resurrection had to await the 1980s, and this was linked to the emergence in Britain of the New Right. Classicism in architecture, as a living remnant of the heydays of British imperialism, was in good favour again, and there was no shortage now of funds. In 1981–82, the Hayward Gallery hosted a spectacular tribute to him.

  In India, however, the graph of simplistic veneration never wavered. From the very beginning, Lutyens was deified, and any serious critique of his work was often considered blasphemy. The issue here is not one of merits, but of attitude. It is as if the ‘natives’, unable to remember what the man thought of them or to critically evaluate what he built, were simply awed into obeisance by the fact that a man of his stature had come to build for them. A photograph of Lutyens with his Indian bearer (included in The Letters of Edwin Lutyens to his Wife Lady Emily) provides a good visual illustration of such an approach. Lutyens, in a smart suit and a pipe on his lip, towers over his servant, the diminutive ‘Persotum’ (for Purushottam), who, in an oversized coat and ill-matching trousers and native cap, looks deferentially up to his master.

  It could be argued that an assessment of Lutyens’ work need not be influenced by the derogatory views he held of the local people and their culture. But how can the mind of the builder not inform what he builds? Buildings, especially grand buildings that define cities and neighbourhoods—and in this case an empire—are never strictly functional. The truth is that Lutyens’ views of India and what he built in India are interlinked; his views influenced his work. If he had genuinely tried to evolve a style that amalgamated the best in Indian and western architectural traditions—as some of us Indians think he did—he might have deserved the great regard in which he is held. When New Delhi was being planned, some influential scholars and opinion makers in Britain argued that the new capital should encourage the projection of Indian architecture and art. But Lutyens was openly dismissive of such views. His purpose was simplistically to build a palace on western classical lines, and he made no secret of this. ‘I want to revive in India,’ he declared, ‘a classic tradition such as the Greeks gave her and by which she so greatly profited.’ When it was known that even King George was inclined towards the Mughal style, Lutyens wrote indignantly: ‘Fancy Shakespeare being asked by Queen Elizabeth to write an ode in Chaucerian metre.’ It is a matter of historical record that he finally agreed to reluctantly incorporate some Indian features only on the insistence of Viceroy Hardinge, who felt that a palace built solely on European lines would defeat the imperial purpose of giving the natives something to identify with. But a creative synthesis would have required imagination and sensitivity, and these were quite beyond the abilities of a man who was convinced that Hindu architecture was ‘beyond understanding’, Mughal architecture was ‘piffle’, European hybrid architecture was ‘half-caste’ and only the European classic style was always ‘better, wiser, saner’.

  It is no surprise, therefore, that the greatest concentration of Indian motifs—elephant legs and sandstone bells—is found in the service entrance and the guardhouse of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. There are a few other tokenisms, like the occasional use of chhajjas, chhatris and jaalis, the stereotypical elephants at the main entrance—Lutyens used to draw dancing elephants for his children even before he came to India—and the use of temple-bell motifs and the Sanchi-patterned grille around the dome. The rhubarb-and biscuit-coloured sandstone adds great beauty and dignity to the building, but it is interesting that its use was recommended by the geological department, and Lutyens himself had originally preferred to use white marble. In fact, even the Mughal Garden was the idea of Lord Hardinge; Lutyens himself wanted an English garden. Essentially, therefore, his contribution was to replicate the classic European style, with the massive Corinthian columns dominating the façade of the building and the vaulted Darbar Hall clearly patterned on Hadrian’s Pantheon. The attempt by later apologists, chiefly orchestrated by the Lutyens’ Trust in London, to credit their hero with ‘remarkable foresight and awareness of local factors’, by which he supposedly allowed ‘indigenous themes and details to shine through’, is a transparent attempt to finesse the truth to fit the image—increasingly popular in Britain—of a benevolent colonialism that gave to the natives far more, or at least as much, as it took away from them.

  The benevolent imperialist, who has the good of his subjects at heart even if he reviles them, is the new hero in the neo-appraisal of colonialism. A good example of this ideology is the comment of the architect Andrew Wilton, who wrote in 2006 that the great dome of the Viceroy’s Palace, which he had (rightly) thought earlier to be ‘verging on the totalitarian’, was actually ‘an extraordinarily successful balance of motifs from European and Moghul architecture creating a highly original form …’ 34 Such an interpretation would have certainly surprised Lutyens, for he was quite clear that the dome he had designed expressed ‘the very essence of art for empire’s sake’. He was not concerned about the need to bring in indigenous motifs, or to create a ‘highly original form’ blending the two. When he designed it he meant it ‘to brood over the city, astoundingly animate, like the topeed head of a British soldier, district officer, missionary or viceroy, while great arms below grasp to subdue in their embrace an alien land and culture’. 35

  Some other aspects of Lutyens’ planning are open to serious interrogation. Along with Herbert Baker he was part of the original search team to locate the site for the Viceroy’s Palace. He chose Raisina Hill, the outcrop of hard rock on the western perimeter of Delhi that formed a part of the low-lying and ancient Aravali ranges. The elevation may have suited the imperial gaze, but there could have been better options, had an architect more sensitive to local history been involved. The important earlier cities of Delhi were all located on the Yamuna; the river had always been the m
ost distinctive natural feature in the dust bowl of Delhi’s plains. And the Aravalis, because of their role as the ecological lungs of the city, needed to be left untouched. Shah Jahan, the greatest builder among the Mughals, had built his city Shahjahanabad keeping the river as the focus; the Red Fort was on the river, and its exquisite pavilions and palaces overlooked it. Most of the great cities of Europe—indeed, London itself—were built along rivers. The problem of low-lying marshy land was common to all these cities, and need not have become an insuperable obstacle in devising a plan to imaginatively include the river in the design for New Delhi. Civil Lines, north of Kashmere Gate, where the foundation stone for the new city was originally laid during the Durbar of 1911, was one option adjacent to the river. The area south of the old city, abutting the river on either bank, was another possibility. But Lutyens’ architectural sensitivities were limited by his inability to see beyond a Parthenon-like acropolis looking down upon the natives. The Yamuna became a neglected periphery in this vision, and the legacy continues to take its toll. The river is today a cesspool, flowing on the fringes of the areas of power and influence, and a great natural asset has been devalued.

  Another great loss was the manner in which New Delhi was planned without integrating, in some manner, the old city. The First Report of the Town Planning Committee of Delhi had resolved in 1913 that ‘the important thing was that the new site must be Delhi—i.e., an area in close physical and general association with the present city of Delhi and the Delhis of the past’. 36 To ensure this, there were proposals to link Shahjahanabad to the new city by at least two major avenues, thereby preventing the isolation of the old city and achieving both urban integration and historical continuity. ‘A long processional avenue was planned from the Fort, through Delhi Gate, past a park and a boulevard with the houses of Indian princes lining both sides. Another was to cut through the side of Jama Masjid from the proposed King Edward Memorial Park, and bear southward to the railway station, whence another road was to lead to Kashmere Gate.’ 37 At least two influential British architects, Patrick Geddes (who visited India in 1914) and H.V. Lanchester, strongly supported this scheme, as did Sir Malcom Hailey, who even wrote an unsigned article in the Times of India arguing that the new Delhi should not be cut off from the old. But these roads were never built, and one cannot escape the conclusion that, given Lutyens’ views on the natives and their architecture, the proposal did not matter very greatly to him. He saw himself as the architect of imperial Britain, which of course he was, but it was his very narrow and racist interpretation of this brief that straitjacketed his architectural vision. The conviction that everything about the natives was inferior made him see things in black and white: the new or the old, and never the twain should meet. This obstinate belief—even within an imperial outlook—that almost nothing from India’s past should find a place in the building of New Delhi, has had extremely deleterious consequences for the evolution of the capital city. As the historian Narayani Gupta writes, if these roads had materialized, ‘there might have been a closer integration between the two cities than did occur; there might not have occurred, either, the tragic metamorphosis of the “walled city” after 1947, when it became an inward-looking world hemmed in by the galloping urbanization all around …’ 38 Today New Delhi continues to be an insulated bastion of the powerful elite, and the old city is a congested and neglected backwater whose architectural heritage is being destroyed with the same intensity as that with which the LBZ has been preserved.

  The new capital stretching out from the foot of Raisina Hill was meticulously planned and is even today a haven of green, quiet and order in the urban chaos of the rest of Delhi. One of Lutyens’ singular achievements was the planning of the wide boulevards that run through the city. (Though the beautiful trees along the main avenues were the choice of the horticulturist P.H. Clutterback, who had to struggle to convince Lutyens.) But overall, Lutyens made little attempt to be forward-looking or modern, and limited himself to a simplistic reiteration of colonial priorities: bungalows for the sahibs and servant quarters for those meant to serve them. The allocation of space in conformity with such a vision shackled New Delhi to the inequities of the past, and could not but be inimical to the proclaimed democratic ethos of the new republic born just two decades later. Lutyens wasn’t expected to be sensitive to this development, although, if he had not been so blinkered by imperialist disdain, he could have anticipated it. Each bungalow—especially along the main avenues—was allocated acres of private space; some were located—and remain so today—in as many as five to six acres of fenced-off private territory for the use of a single individual or family. Behind these palatial homesteads built in the well-worn colonial style with nothing new or original about them, was an entirely different, congested world of back lanes and cramped servant quarters hidden from sight, and this is how things remain today. In other words, Lutyens institutionalized in brick and mortar the sahib–servant hierarchy, and while his imperial vision is understandable, the deification of this kind of city by the Indian elite and the bureaucratic-political leadership of democratic and independent India is embarrassing. Of course, the reasons are not difficult to understand. The LBZ suited perfectly the needs of the new elite that took over the reins of power from the British. The Indian sahibs rather liked the outsized bungalows for themselves, and did not think there was anything really wrong in the army of servants crammed into the warren of tiny quarters somewhere at the back. Lutyens’ New Delhi was, therefore, frozen in time not because its architectural attributes were unquestionable, but because it corresponded very well—and continues to do so—with the interests of the powerful and influential—first the British, and then the brown burra-sahibs.

  In October 2007, the British Council and the London-based Lutyens Trust organized another extravaganza in New Delhi in tribute to its creator. Sixty-two architects, historians, members of the Lutyens Trust and six family members descended upon the capital. Margaret Richardson, honorary curator of architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts, and Paul Waite, architectural historian and Lutyens Trust Trustee, put together an exhibition at the British Council titled: ‘Rashtrapati Bhavan in Context—The Work of Sir Edwin Lutyens O.M.’ And once again several Indians genuflected in awe. With the sole exception of the historian Aman Nath, no one asked the inconvenient question; no one remembered Lutyens’ racist dismissal of everything Indian; no one attempted, however respectfully, to critically reappraise his legacy. The members of the trust were fêted and fawned upon as on the previous occasion, and everybody listened attentively to their concerns that the LBZ should be preserved better.

  Again, a not-so-subtle attempt was made to do an image make-over, to somehow give to Lutyens’ character the benevolent image of the great synthesizer. The internet write-up on the exhibition began by announcing that ‘one of the key themes of the exhibition is the interplay of influences in both directions: the deep influence of India (and her strong aesthetic traditions) on the work of Lutyens, as well as the influence of British architectural traditions on India’s capital city’. It went on to argue how Lutyens willingly curtailed his ‘beliefs in constructional logic and proportion’ to accommodate Indian architecture. His damning and sustained dismissal of Indian architecture was glossed over by the passing comment that ‘his initial impressions’ were critical. There was inevitably, if unintentionally, the condescension: ‘In Delhi he took a good deal of trouble in assembling and training the Indian craftsmen who would work on Rashtrapati Bhavan, and had always been enthusiastic for making the building of New Delhi the opportunity for establishing a training centre of building craftsmanship.’ Unaware of the contradiction, but keen to reinforce the theme of Lutyens as a great admirer of Indian skills, the text elsewhere says that ‘his work in Delhi is brilliantly crafted by Indian workmen using traditional skills’. Finally, there is, of course, the familiar homily that the natives should do nothing to change the city he built, and take ‘great care’ to preserve the ‘low den
sity’ of its planning.

  The guardians need not have worried. The charter of INTACH on Lutyens Delhi, adopted in 2002, goes so far as to say that the names of the streets in the LBZ should never be changed. Article 13 of the charter states: ‘The constant rechristening of streets and lanes in commemoration of national leaders, visiting dignitaries and tragic victims might flatter some egos and serve short-sighted ends, but they rob the city of its historic associations.’ The argument is absolute; there is no deliberative tone which would allow for some road names to be kept and others to be reviewed. The capital of independent India, so the writers of the charter would have it, must not have any streets that recall its own leaders or writers or poets or artists. So mesmerized are they by Lutyens that their only desire is to fossilize in perpetuity every detail of what he and his masters built as the capital of British India. In many respects, their vision is as elitist and imperialist as their hero’s. They would like that the ‘housing in the back lanes [read servant quarters] should be relocated to suitable locations’ two kilometres outside the LBZ (Article VI). The sacred altar of the great architect should not be sullied by the hoi-polloi, the menials who must yet be available for service. ‘Each bungalow in the LBZ has between 5–12 servant quarters and with inclusion of support staff the population density averages between 40–60 per bungalow,’ protests the charter, and this has ‘resulted in many unauthorized spill offs, and in jhuggi-like constructions in the back lanes of New Delhi’. Lutyens was not the architect of the back lane-wallahs, and nor are his current band of conservationist devotees at INTACH. No attempt was made by INTACH to try and see how an imaginative, even if marginal, reuse of land could provide better amenities and housing to those who live in the servant quarters. The solution is simply to banish them somehow, and to freeze the LBZ in unthinking homage to its maker.