Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  And yet, Lutyens’ ‘genius’ isn’t really the reason why New Delhi is—and will remain, at least in the foreseeable future—the way it is. Not the faultless vision of that colonial architect, but the unfortunate fact that the architectural genius of India was crippled during the years of British rule, is the real reason why we see so many defend the project to preserve Lutyens’ Delhi. The genuine fear is that the current crop of Indian architects and bureaucratic planners might substitute it with something that is likely to be infinitely worse. The dialectics of the colonial process has to be understood for the double jeopardy it involves: it makes the colonized admirers of the very people who rubbish their cultural and artistic abilities, and, in the process, severs them from their own time-tested skills and aesthetic traditions, reducing them to bad imitators. Three hundred years ago Indians would have laughed at the thought of a foreigner needing to set up a centre to teach their craftsmen to build. The reaction would be understandable: after all, the planned cities of the Indus Valley civilization were built some 3000 years before the birth of Christ. The Vedic texts refer to forts and citadels, and the Rig Veda speaks convincingly of a palace of a thousand doors and as many columns. The Mauryan empire (321–232 BC) saw Indian craftsmen build stupas and chaityas and vast and complex shrines from natural rock, as well as sophisticated secular buildings such as the palace at Pataliputra (modern Patna). The grammarian Panini (520–460 BC) refers to well-developed Hindu temples, and later these evolved into the northern Nagara style with its stepped pyramid roofing structures, and the southern Dravida style best seen in the magnificent Brihadeeswara temple at Thanjavur or the Sun Temple at Konarak.

  Significantly, this was not a process of random evolution. The canons of architecture were codified in more than one treatise, the most famous being the Mayamatam and the Mansara, compiled during the Chola period over a thousand years ago. Maya, the divine architect, is said to have authored the 3300 verses and thirty-six chapters of the Mayamatam which deal extensively with the choice of sites, the form of construction and iconography. The Mansara, similar in nature, is even longer, comprising 5400 verses in seventy chapters. Pre-dating both of these by at least another thousand years is the Vaastu-shastra, or the science of architecture, which was already well known in Vedic times. Suffice to say that several hundred years before the British came, Indian architecture had evolved a sophisticated vocabulary and idiom of its own, congruent to the felt needs and requirements of its people. If there is any doubt about this, a visit to just one site should set it to rest: Ellora, near Aurangabad, where thirty-five exquisite Buddhist, Jain and Hindu temples were carved out of the vertical face of the Charanandri hills between the fifth and the tenth centuries CE. In particular, the multi-storeyed Kailash temple, designed to recall Shiva’s abode of Mount Kailash, is an architectural wonder. Covering an area twice the size of the Parthenon in Athens, it is carved out of a single rock, and required the excavation of 200,000 tonnes of rock. This confident architectural dexterity can be gauged too in northern Karnataka, in the magnificent city of Hampi, now in ruins, which was built as the capital of the Vijayanagara empire in the fourteenth century.

  With the coming of the Muslims around 1000 CE, Indian architecture absorbed the influences of Central Asia and Persia. The Turks and Afghans came to conquer, and their first encounter was both violent and destructive, but they stayed on to make India their home. Their rulers set up dynasties, but Hindu craftsmen helped them to build their forts and mosques and palaces. The arch, the dome, the minaret and the vault became a part of the vocabulary of Indian architecture in a process that enriched both the indigenous tradition and that of the newcomers. The Mughals who came in the sixteenth century only further developed and embellished this evolving synthesis. The Taj Mahal and the city of Fatehpur Sikri at Agra perhaps best illustrate this creative and appealing blending of traditions, but its influence can be seen all over India, in the havelis of the north, the wadas of Maharashtra, the pols of Ahmedabad, the forts of Rajasthan, the charbagh gardens across the country and the pitched roofs of houses in Kerala.

  Why did Indian architecture lose its animating and living impulse during British rule? What set Indian architects and craftsmen, who could construct grand temples by sculpting entire mountains, or build a mausoleum like the Taj Mahal, to produce structures like Shastri Bhavan and Udyog Bhavan along the central vista in New Delhi—both unimaginative monstrosities so completely adrift from the highly stylized and sophisticated traditions they had evolved over centuries? The answer lies in the nature of British occupation. The British judged Indian art and architecture from a ruler’s conviction that their principles of aesthetics and of shape and form were the ideal; from this point of view, Indian architecture was, as James Fergusson stated in his History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, ‘a mistake nothing can redeem’. The beautiful temples of the south had no appeal for him, for they lacked ‘those lofty aims and noble results which constitute the merit and greatness of true architectural art’. 39 The Madurai temple he found particularly barbarous—‘the most vulgar building in all of India’—while Sanchi ‘showed neither delicacy nor precision’. 40

  Such prejudice and arrogance was reinforced by a conscious policy of excluding traditional architectural skills. E.B. Havell, who was the principal of the Government School of Art in Calcutta in the early 1900s, and whose views we shall discuss in greater detail elsewhere, points out that the public works department under British rule made it a policy to ignore indigenous knowledge and expertise. Indian masons and stone carvers, paid at the rate of two rupees a day, were instructed only to copy the regulation European ornament prescribed by the European architect, so that the Indian builder became just ‘a bad imitator of inferior European architecture’. Lord Curzon turned down a proposal to invite Indian master builders in the construction of the Victoria Memorial at Calcutta on the plea that Indian methods of construction could not create a space as large as what was envisaged. The argument was laughable, and clearly illustrative of institutional hostility, for as Havell rightly points out, ‘the architects of Bijapur, who invented the ingenious and beautiful method of balancing the weight of a dome inside a building, instead of outside, constructed buildings with a floor space greater than that of the Parthenon of Rome’. Such disdain for Indian artistic traditions, and the lack of opportunity and patronage that was its consequence, almost completely destroyed the natural evolution of India’s architectural heritage, disrupting the web of delicate and time-tested linkages between structure, need, functionality, climate, custom and form. The result was an artistic wasteland devoid of inspiration or role models, and, increasingly, of the indigenous skills refined over centuries.

  The tragedy was that members of the Indian royalty, who had always been the biggest patrons of Indian architecture, now forsook their own heritage. If earlier the British built palaces and memorials in their own image designed by European architects, now leading members of the Indian royalty hired English architects to build their mahals. Ironically, this preference for a foreign aesthetic over one’s own gained momentum in the final years before 1947. Many of these foreign architects were men who had lost out to Lutyens and Baker in the construction of New Delhi, but were still good enough for the Indian elite for whom their appointment was a status symbol, a means to flaunt their connections with the British rulers. In 1919, the Indian royals were inducted into a Chamber of Princes and needed residences in Delhi when they came to attend its meetings. Osman Ali Khan, the seventh Nizam of Hyderabad, built Hyderabad House in 1928, and managed to get Lutyens to design it. Planned in the shape of a butterfly, it was the largest of such palaces, and while it was meant to have some Indian features, the Nizam’s sons found it much too western and hardly ever used it. The Maharaja of Jaipur was allotted land opposite the Nizam’s, and built the Lutyens-style Jaipur House. Another neighbour was Maharao Umed Singh II, the scion of the kingdom of Kota in eastern Rajasthan. In 1857 the Kota army had revolted and attacked the B
ritish Residency, but in 1938 Umed Singh wanted his Delhi palace to reflect the imperial art deco form, a style that did not even pretend to incorporate Indian motifs, but was much sought after only because it was the new thing in Europe. Havell would not have approved, but there was nobody willing to listen to him.

  Art deco originated in France in the 1920s and was France’s favourite calling card in the decorative arts at that time. Its radical modernism was part of the evolution of architecture in the west, and its essential principles, including the use of materials like aluminium and steel to celebrate the machine age, were understandable in that context, but completely alien to India. Transplanting this ‘style moderne’—as the French called it—on Indian soil was not about the enlightened eclecticism associated with the assimilative cultural history of India, but an act of mindless imitation. A style that did not look out of place in the interiors of cinemas in Europe, or on the Golden Gate in San Francisco, or in European ocean liners and American railway stations built in the 1930s, was transported into the living spaces of the Indian rich merely because it was the rage in the west. As often happens in such cases, the ‘originators’, to whom the style belonged as an organic part of their architectural evolution, could discard it after the Second World War for being too minimalistic or gaudy, while the ‘emulators’ persisted with it until well into the 1960s.

  Perhaps the most flamboyant expression of a building furnished in the art deco style is the Umaid Bhavan palace in Jodhpur. It was commissioned in 1943 by the then ruler of the Jodhpur kingdom, Maharaja Manvendra Singh, as a means of providing employment to his impoverished people during a period of drought and famine. Manvendra Singh was a traditional Rajput ruler, but had been educated in England, and loved polo and flying. His choice of architect for Umaid Bhavan was, expectedly, not any descendant of the master builders who could design and construct the magical forts and havelis of Rajasthan, but an Englishman, H.V. Lanchester, who had tried but failed to get the commission to build New Delhi. If Lutyens and Baker could build the new capital, Jodhpur could at least have the British architect who lost out. In January 2005, Renuka and I were invited by Manvendra’s son, Gaj Singh, for his fifty-seventh birthday. We were received at the airport by men in traditional attire, jodhpurs, achkans and resplendent turbans, and driven to Umaid Bhavan in an open vintage Buick. On the way we passed an open ground which we were told was still famous because Winston Churchill once played polo there. A few other, less exalted, landmarks later, we were at the enormous palace, which stands on a mound, a huge blob of burnished sandstone towering over the stunted landscape.

  Lanchester was not an incompetent architect. And yet, his creation in Jodhpur is a curious hybrid. The stone in which it is built is indigenous. Some stylistic elements are also Indian, such as the ornamentation, and the principal dome that soars into the sky. But once the awesome size of the structure is taken in, there is an uncomfortable aftertaste, as though somehow its maker was hopelessly out of sync with Indian aesthetics, and had deliberately used the monumental scale of construction to camouflage or compensate for this. All the elements you would expect in an Indian palace are there—pillars, domes, arches, jaalis, chhatris, courtyards and minarets—but not in the right proportion. Something is amiss, as would happen to a dish if a lauded chef inexplicably loses his sense of proportion and forgets the sequence and quantities in which the ingredients are to be mixed. The dome looks awkward, not rising effortlessly from its base as that of the Taj Mahal; the four minarets strangely flatten out towards the top, recalling less the grace of a pinnacle and more the lines of a distorted Chinese pagoda. The main veranda, with its huge colonnades and the vast lawn stretching below, is English, but at the end of the vista is a traditional baradari.

  What Umaid Bhavan lacked in aesthetics was more than made up for by the old-world warmth and hospitality of Gaj Singh, the current Maharaja popularly known as ‘Bapji’, and his charming wife Hemlata. Gaj Singh, who enjoys the title of Maharaja only in name ever since Indira Gandhi abolished princely privileges and privy purses in 1967, was just four when his father died in an air crash. His mother quickly packed him off to school in England. He would have probably been sent there anyway but she was in a hurry, afraid of palace intrigue against the infant heir apparent. The young prince studied at Harrow and went on to Oxford. He returned to his kingdom only at the age of twenty-four, and almost the whole of Jodhpur came out on the streets to welcome him back. Unlike many of the former royalty, Gaj Singh learnt to cope with a republican India. He converted Umaid Bhavan into a luxury hotel (retaining a part of it as his personal residence), created the right family trusts, flirted with politics, and now devotes himself to heritage conservation and development projects.

  The celebrations of Bapji’s birthday provided a wonderful opportunity to observe the schizophrenia that afflicts the Anglicized post-colonial Indian from a heavily traditional background. The scale of the celebrations is much reduced now, so an entire programme of events involving local people was crowded into two days. On the first day we drove in procession to the magnificent Mehrangarh Fort, built by Gaj Singh’s ancestor Rao Jodha in 1459 and expanded and embellished by the rulers who followed, in particular Jaswant Singh in the seventeenth century. Mehrangarh is one of the largest forts in Rajasthan, and within its ramparts are some of India’s most beautiful palaces, home to the royal family until less than 150 years ago. Today, the Mehrangarh Fort, whose architectural authenticity is drawn from centuries of lived experience in sync with the local culture and living conditions, is overshadowed by Lanchester’s Umaid Bhavan, and has become a museum, the history and culture it sustained a curiosity. The fort with its traditional courtyards and palaces and art work, and the palace designed by the British architect and furnished in the art deco style, stand facing each other, like monumental metaphors of what once was and what had replaced it, and of the two worlds that the educated Indian has been forced to inhabit, whether at the level of a maharaja or a middle-class person: worlds created by the disruption of continuity and the mutilation of choice. The result is several million Indians leading strangely parallel lives, and an entire people condemned to the confusions and inequities of a schizophrenic national ethos—a condition that no one who hasn’t been colonized will ever experience or understand.

  Walking in the Mehrangarh Fort I ask myself where all the artisans have gone who could produce fabulous artefacts in camel bone and silver, adorn hookah bowls with stunningly delicate carvings and embellish lacquer paintings so skilfully. I look at the royal costumes, the gold-plated palanquins and chiselled swords, the incredibly rich carpets, the fantasy-world objects in mirror work, the royal tents and carpets, and think of a time when excellence was a product of the soil and of tradition, untainted by mimicry or the need to be judged by a foreign aesthetic. The jaalis in red sandstone are so intricate that it is difficult to believe that the craftsmen had worked on stone, not wood. I am told that no cement has been used in the construction; the walls and roofs are joined by an interlocking system that has stood the test of time. The Sheesh Mahal, where all the walls and the ceilings are covered with pieces of mirror, is so designed that a single candle flame is reflected from a million pieces. I pause at the mujra room, where courtesans would sing and dance for the Maharaja and his guests, and marvel at the ivory-inlaid doors, the walls covered by gold leaf and the elaborate chandeliers.

  I leave Mehrangarh with a gnawing sense of loss, not merely nostalgia for a past that cannot—and perhaps should not—be resurrected entirely, but a feeling that a certain aesthetic tradition that once was, and could perhaps have endured, has been greatly eroded, perhaps even lost. The pagoda-like minarets of Umaid Bhavan loom in the distance, and on the city streets I vaguely take in a huge hoarding advertising a new housing complex where each home is guaranteed to look exactly like a Spanish villa.

  In the evening we were invited for an early round of drinks to the house of Sundar Singh, an important Rajput notable, who is the right-hand
man of Gaj Singh. The house was crowded with Indian artefacts, but rather incongruously, an entire wall of the living room was taken by a huge painting of Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo. Sundar Singh proudly informed me that it was the work of his daughter, who had copied it from an English book. The painting looked out of place, but I forced myself to say a few words of praise. Just then Sundar Singh’s young and pretty daughter-in-law was introduced to me. She had studied management, and is deeply involved in her father-in-law’s tourism business. We talked for a while, mostly in English, which she speaks very well. Soon it was time to leave. In a reflex action remarkable for its fluidity, she bowed to say goodbye. It was done in the traditional way, with all the grace that comes from being executed naturally, something she must have inherited from her mother, and she from hers. Napoleon’s gaze followed us to the door as we left for Umaid Bhavan.

  Jawaharlal Nehru, the founder of modern India, to whom the country must forever be grateful for his vision of a progressive and modern nation, was also, like many remarkable Indians of his generation and background, a product of the colonial experience. Nehru spent the formative years of his life as a student in England; his commitment to India’s freedom was never in doubt, but in spite of himself, he could not but internalize key aspects of the colonial appraisal. ‘It was natural and inevitable that Indian nationalism should resent alien rule,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘and yet it was curious how large numbers of our intelligentsia … accepted, consciously or unconsciously, the British ideology of Empire … The history and economics and other subjects that were taught in the schools and colleges were written entirely from the British imperial view-point, and laid stress on our numerous failings in the past … We accepted to some extent this distorted version, and even when we resisted it instinctively we were influenced by it.’ 41 Without doubt, Nehru must not have wanted to be influenced by the colonial critique of India’s past, but because he was extraordinarily perceptive he could understand why this could happen even against one’s will—as indeed happened in his own case. A yearning for a modernity heavily influenced by western notions, and a rejection of the past strongly influenced by colonial assessments, became key elements of Nehru’s world view. It was a view born of a proud statesman’s desire to see his country as the equal of any western nation, and it appeared recurrently in his well-intentioned exhortations to the Indian people.