Apex or Decline? New Delhi and British Imperial Power
At the same time as Peter the Great was planning to move his capital to the Baltic, a new nation-state was emerging on the western margins of Europe. This was Great Britain which came into being as a result of the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707. Within a century this new nation-state, having become the greatest naval power in the world, was poised to achieve a global dominance greater than that of any previous country in world history.
By the nineteenth century the British Empire bestrode the world and, famously, large parts of the political map were coloured in bright pink, the favoured imperial colour. This enormous empire stretched into every continent and was proudly described as the empire upon which the sun never set. However, unlike Russia, where the move to a new capital had preceded the rise to world power, the centre of this vast political edifice remained in London, the old English capital. Many splendid buildings were later built in London, but it nevertheless remained essentially a multi-functional city which became the dominant political, financial and trading hub first of Britain and then of the whole British Empire. By the end of the nineteenth century, separate centres of government had been established in all the dependent territories but their role was, initially at least, largely administrative and very much subject to the overall authority of the home government in London. It was in India that a city was finally built that was more a statement of imperial power than any other city in the Empire.
The British association with India went back to the sixteenth century and by the following century ports or factories were established around the Indian coasts which were intended as bases for the growing trading relationship. Trade was in the hands of the East India Company and the most important base of operations was Calcutta in the delta of the Ganges. When Britain attained a dominating position in the later eighteenth century Calcutta was the site chosen to be the capital. A Government House was built in the classical style, taking its inspiration from Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, the seat of the Curzon family.1 Calcutta’s political role was further enhanced when Britain secured control over the greater part of the subcontinent in the early nineteenth century.
However, Calcutta with its hot and wet monsoon climate had never really been a very satisfactory place for Europeans. Tropical diseases were prevalent and in the early days the death rate in the city had been very high. To combat this, in 1863 the decision was taken to make the hill station of Simla the official summer capital. This lay in the foothills of the Himalayas north of the old Mughal capital of Delhi. Communication between Calcutta and Simla was poor and at times when it had removed to Simla the government of India was barely in touch with Calcutta, let alone with the massive subcontinent over which it ruled.
Until the middle of the nineteenth century the affairs of India were actually largely in the hands of the East India Company. Not only was it in charge of all trading operations throughout the subcontinent but it was also given a political role and even had soldiers from the British Army seconded into its service. The government representative in Calcutta was the governor general who, of necessity, had to work closely with the Company. However, following the Indian Mutiny in 1858, which shook the British establishment in India to its foundations, the company’s dominating role was brought to an end and the government took direct charge of Indian affairs. At the head of the new government of India was the viceroy, the direct representative of the sovereign, who combined quasi-regal with quasi-prime-ministerial roles. The imperial seal was set on the new direct rule arrangements in 1877 when Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India and the full inheritance of the defunct Mughal Empire was taken over by Britain.
However, Calcutta, the early British settlement, was still the capital and was to remain so until the beginning of the twentieth century when it was decided to move to the old Mughal capital of Delhi. The decision was actually made in 1905 just at the end of the period of office of Lord Curzon, one of the most remarkable viceroys. This period is generally regarded as having been the apex of British imperial power, not just in India but throughout the world. The decision to make the move therefore came at a time when signs of the forthcoming decline were as yet barely perceptible. Curzon, a great believer in empire, was actually very much against moving the capital away from Calcutta, but in spite of the objections of this highly influential statesman, the move began shortly afterwards.
The reasons for this momentous decision were various. Delhi had, of course, been the Mughal capital, and before that the seat of the Sultanate of Delhi, and it was widely thought of in India as being the real capital of the country. Calcutta, on the other hand, was a foreign city built on the edge of the subcontinent to meet the needs of a foreign power. The fact that a few decades earlier Queen Victoria had been proclaimed Empress of India put the British sovereign directly in the line of succession to the earlier rulers. It seemed natural that the representative of the empress would be in their capital and so the move would be a late but much needed symbol of British imperial rule.
Of greater practical significance was the huge geopolitical change which began to take place in the Indian subcontinent after 1867. This was a decade before the proclamation of the queen as empress and was brought about by the opening of the Suez Canal in that year. This event made communications with Britain much faster and easier. The sea route was now through the Red and Arabian seas and then directly to the west coast of India. This made a west coast port such as Bombay a far more logical terminus for the voyage than Calcutta, which was on the east coast. This all produced the beginnings of a massive geopolitical reorientation of the Indian subcontinent from east to west. With ships now docking in Bombay, Delhi was also more accessible than Calcutta, the train journey to the former being much shorter and easier than to the latter. In addition the British were already using the Simla hill station which was also far more accessible from Delhi. As a result, everything was now pointing to Delhi as the preferred seat of government.
There were also more purely political factors involved. British imperial policy was an evolving one and had entailed giving greater power to the overseas possessions. Canada was the first to secure a form of home rule as early as 1868. This policy of limited devolution was then continued with other dependent territories. By the early twentieth century it was widely considered that more political power should be given to the Indians and this process was soon to be expedited following the election of a Liberal government in 1906. The transfer of more power to India was something the British increasingly felt it wise to do. The Indian Mutiny had come as a great shock and had reminded the British of their tenuous hold over this massive country. They remained fearful that it might all happen again and it was always necessary to keep Indian sensibilities in mind. By the end of the nineteenth century these were already coming to be expressed more volubly. In 1885 the first meeting of the Indian National Congress took place. Interestingly, this organization was actually the inspiration of a British official, A. O. Hume, and it soon became the vehicle for the expression of the feelings of the Indians and their desire to have more power in their own hands. The combination of a Liberal government and Indian aspirations was a powerful motive for a policy of greater power-sharing.
There were thus powerful historical and political motives for the move of the capital to Delhi but there was also an underlying strategic one deriving from the fact that the British now ruled over a gigantic world empire. In many ways India had become the most vital link, controlling and protecting the imperial routeways crossing the Indian Ocean and connecting the west to the east of the vast chain of imperial possessions. Thus the move of the capital of what was in many ways the keystone of the arch of British power was also motivated by reasons connected with the retention, not the relinquishment, of British world power. ‘India’, wrote the French political geographer Goblet in 1935, ‘is the imperial geographical centre of the British Empire … Here rules Britannia, who holds the trident of Poseidon.’ At the same time, he added, ‘Her rule is subject to evolution, just as all in this very varied world is subject to evolution.’2 Both continuity and change were being catered for in the choice of Delhi as the new capital.
The move now made by the British at the beginning of the twentieth century was in geopolitical terms in most ways the opposite of the move which Peter the Great had made two centuries earlier. By transferring his capital from Moscow to St Petersburg he had moved from land to sea. That move was made in pursuit of modernization, which was linked closely to maritime power, and away from an old capital which, in Peter’s mind at least, had all the wrong associations. In the case of Delhi, the move was away from the sea and back to the old capital in the centre of the land. This capital had all the associations of imperial power dating back over many centuries. It represented more than anything the fact that Britain had moved from being a dynamic commercial nation to an imperial power in the more traditional sense.
It would seem from this that in the early twentieth century the British intention was to embrace the Indian past and its political arrangements rather than to carry on with the creation of something new, western and distinctive. This reflected deeper differences in the imperial attitudes of Britain and Russia, which were still in the early twentieth century the two major world powers. The Russians, powerful on land, had wished to complement this power by achieving power at sea. The British, supremely powerful at sea, wished now to increase their power on land. The pursuit of global power was seen to require far more than the establishment of a network of trading stations. India was a massive landmass which also needed to be defended on its landward side and to achieve this territorial thinking was essential.
These were all factors of which the viceroy Lord Curzon had been well aware, but his advocacy of a dynamic and forward frontier policy was something the London government found difficult to swallow.3 Nevertheless, Delhi was far more strategically suitable for this purpose as a result of its location much closer to the vulnerable northern frontiers. For the Mughals and their predecessors who had conquered India from the land, the continental connection, together with the security of the northern frontiers, had been of prime importance. Historically Delhi had been the natural capital for the invaders from the land who had always remained highly conscious of the direction from which new dangers to the subcontinent were most likely to come.
In 1912 the viceroy moved to the newly built Viceregal Lodge just north of the old city. This was close to the Ridge which was where the British army had been concentrated during the Mutiny. The old fortifications dating from that turbulent time now looked down on the new seat of power below. It was not far from the fort, the old centre of Mughal power, where the last emperor had surrendered to the British. However, this move was meant to be only a temporary one and was not exactly where the new capital was intended to be.
Two architects were chosen to build the new capital, namely Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker. Both had been prominent figures in the move away from the old mid-Victorian Gothick to the new late and post-Victorian architecture. This was intended to combine a greater attention to efficient house design with an Edwardian neoclassical style. The centre of the new capital was to be the palace of the viceroy flanked by two adjacent government buildings. While Baker was to be the principal architect for this Imperial Secretariat, Lutyens was put in charge of the viceroy’s palace, which was designated as the centrepiece of the new capital. There was considerable discussion on the actual architectural style of the new capital and this reflected the two very different ideas underlying it. The Liberal imperialists now in power considered that the architecture should include traditional Indian, especially Mughal, features while the Conservative imperialists wished it to be primarily a magnificent assertion of the British Raj. The former included Baker, who wished to make a subtle combination of styles. Lord Hardinge, the new viceroy appointed by the Liberal government, was basically of the same view but he favoured Revival Gothick with Indian features. This was a style close to the traditional British architecture to be found in many other cities throughout India. It was referred to by Jan Morris as being ‘still in its Mongrel phase – Saracenic Gothic, High Victorian Pathan’.4 Others, including Lutyens himself, wanted the whole project to be essentially British and he was in favour of adapting a form of the new British neoclassical style. This was the beginning of the many arguments which were to strain relations between the two principal architects to breaking point.
It was King George V himself who inaugurated the whole great project in 1911. The king-emperor, together with the queen-empress, were in attendance at the magnificent Coronation Durbar held in Delhi that year and in his speech the monarch praised the splendour of Delhi as the historic capital, stressing the need that all new buildings should be sympathetic to its existing architecture. He immediately laid the foundation stone of the new capital. The original location chosen in the north of Delhi did not please either Hardinge or Lutyens and within a short time the foundation stone had been moved secretly at night to Raisina Hill in the south.
The plan was for the viceroy’s palace to be on the highest point and for the Secretariat to consist of two huge buildings on either side of it. A frontal view of the whole complex would therefore not obscure the palace itself. It was intended that a wide avenue would run eastwards from this complex of buildings, terminating in a triumphal arch much in the manner of the Champs-Elysées. On the northern side was to be the new Indian parliament building which would have large numbers of houses for government officials in its vicinity. The church behind the palace was to be constructed in the same architectural style, linking in with the imperial buildings. This was a demonstration of the close relationship between Church – the Church of England – and state in the whole imperial enterprise.
The whole of this vast project was set back by the First World War and building did not resume until after 1918. India had made a considerable contribution to the war effort and suffered numerous casualties. This had a marked effect on the way the project was conducted from this time on. Meanwhile, the government of India was still being carried on from the other side of Delhi and from Simla during the summer months. It took another ten years before the central core of buildings on Raisina Hill was completed and the full move of the government did not to take place until 1928. At that time the grand imperial buildings were set apart on their own, so demonstrating the separation of this ‘New Delhi’ from the ‘Old Delhi’ some distance away.
Photograph from the air of New Delhi in the 1930s. At this time the imperial buildings stood in splendid isolation with little evidence of the infilling which was soon to link them to the old city.
The centrepiece on Raisina Hill was Lutyens’s Palace of the Viceroy which was bigger even than Versailles. Despite the architect’s dislike and even contempt for Indian architecture, concessions had to be made to it and many Indian features were incorporated. At the front was a flight of steps leading to the huge pillared entrance. This led through to the circular Durbar Hall which held the thrones of the viceroy and the vicereine. This hall was designed for the great ceremonies of state. Behind it were large rooms, including the State Drawing Room, the State Dining Room and the Ballroom. The ground floor also had a State Library and accommodation for guests. The first floor contained the private accommodation of the viceroy and his family, together with office space for the large personal secretariat of the viceroy. The exterior view of the palace was the most impressive of all.
In the centre, above the Durbar Hall, was a great shallow copper dome raised on a cylindrical plinth. There have been some suggestions that this has Byzantine features and others that it has the features of a Buddhist stupa. It may be that Lutyens, who is known to have enjoyed architectural puzzles, deliberately left this for others to work out for themselves. On either side of this centrepiece were a series of smaller features which balanced the great dome itself.
The Palace of the Viceroy, now the Presidential Palace, New Delhi.
Behind the palace were the gardens, at the centre of which was the Mughal Garden. Lutyens had always considered that house and garden should complement one another and that an impressive garden was essential to show off the house. The famous garden designer Gertrude Jekyll had long cooperated closely with Lutyens in designing the gardens for his houses in England but it seems improbable that she would have contributed directly to this one. However, signs of her influence were certainly present, perhaps indirectly through Lutyens himself. The vicereine, Lady Hardinge, was closely involved in the project and the Mughal Garden accorded well with the viceregal desire to incorporate Indian features into the palace.
The two Secretariat buildings by Baker were essentially architecturally a prelude to the palace when approached from the avenue but in reality they were where the serious business of governing the vast subcontinent actually took place. Baker incorporated many Mughal features into them and they too each had their own smaller cupolas. These two domes balanced on either side of the great dome itself, imparting a wonderful architectural unity to the whole. All was plan and balance and all had a mathematical accuracy of design. The policy of Indianization meant that by the 1930s increasing numbers of the government officials were themselves Indian and the new capital steadily gained a more Indian character which was in many ways at variance with the basically European architecture.
The great avenue leading eastwards was completed at around the same time as the government buildings. It was named the Kingsway after George V and behind the arch was a statue of the king-emperor himself. The intention of the Kingsway was to provide the most impressive view of the palace and especially of its crowning glory, the magnificent dome, and also to be the way along which ceremonial parades would display the might and splendour of the British Raj. The arch itself was renamed the War Memorial Arch and was dedicated to India’s war dead in the First World War. This was another way of incorporating India and Indians more closely into the whole imperial project.
The Memorial Arch, New Delhi, at the eastern end of the Kingsway, now the Rajpath. Near it is the empty cupola (which can be seen through the arch, beyond) which formerly housed the statue of George V, the only king-emperor actually to visit India. This statue was removed when the country became independent but nothing was put in its place.
While there was a great deal of input from a number of sources, Lutyens was certainly the mastermind behind the whole gigantic project. As William Dalrymple put it, from the shape of the doorknobs to the suitability of the flowers in the flowerbeds, Lutyens was closely involved in every detail.5 When the project was revealed in all its magnificent contradictions it was through the perspective of Lutyens’s architectural ideas that the whole had to be viewed and its success or otherwise judged.
What conclusions can be reached about the real nature of the New Delhi which was in place by the 1930s and how it fits into the general pattern of cities built for imperial power? Did it represent the apex of British power or the beginning of its decline? The fact was that it was undoubtedly both of these things. In 1905, when the project was first conceived, Britain was still at the apex of that world power which had been commemorated in splendid style just eight years earlier in the magnificent pageant for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. In 1905, on the surface at least, the Empire appeared still to be as solid as a rock. ‘There seemed no doubt in most British minds’, wrote Jan Morris, ‘that the empire in India was more or less eternal.’6
William Dalrymple placed New Delhi in the wider imperial context. He wrote that it was the ‘impression of the might and power of the Imperial State that the architects aimed above all to convey’. However, Dalrymple also made more disturbing comparisons when he pointed out its similarity to the buildings of the dictatorships that had arisen in Europe in the wake of the First World War. ‘In its monstrous, almost megalomaniac scale, in its perfect symmetry and arrogant presumption, there was a distant but distinct echo of something Fascist or even Nazi about the great acropolis of Imperial Delhi … all belonged to comparable worlds.’7 Certainly the British Empire, born into the age of maritime imperialism, lived on into the age of the dictatorships which also aspired to their own versions of empire.
It is certainly true that, despite concessions to the fact that this was India and that the British were virtually the self-proclaimed successors to the Mughals, New Delhi was essentially intended as an assertion of British power. Above all, it was particularly designed to be an assertion in stone of the magnificence of its Indian arm, the Raj, the so-called ‘richest jewel in the British Crown’. As Baker put it, the new capital was not to be Indian, English or Roman but imperial. This ‘eighth Delhi’ was intended above all to be a British Delhi, just as the many earlier Delhis had taken the names of their imperial masters down the ages.
However, by 1928, when the full move of the government took place, the world was a very different place from what it had been a quarter of a century earlier. Although after the First World War the British Empire was larger than ever and its power appeared, on the surface at least, even greater, the reality was that Britain had been greatly weakened by the war. This was partly due to the enduring economic problems resulting from it and also the growth of strong national movements in what had always been referred to as the ‘colonies’. Their peoples felt that they had come to the aid of the mother country in her hour of need and that they now deserved some acknowledgement of this. In addition, by 1928 the concept of the ‘Commonwealth’ had come into being and Britain, as well as retaining her position as the major imperial power, was now at the heart of an essentially new organization, the British Commonwealth of Nations. In India the arch at the end of the Kingsway no longer asserted imperial triumph only but was the Indian War Memorial. The new Assembly Building close to the viceroy’s residence acknowledged that the will of the Indian people as expressed by its representatives had to be taken into account. The Indian Congress Party, which had by then been in existence for over half a century, had never been more influential in the affairs of state.
Yet India still remained more closely tied to Britain than the new self-governing dominions of the Commonwealth. The Raj was still very much in place, even though it was by the 1930s recognized that fundamental changes in the relationship would soon have to be made. Writing in 1937, Percival Spear caught the sense of change at the end of his book on Delhi:
The importance of Delhi is founded on more than the presence of a court or an army; it rests upon its great public buildings which cannot be lightly abandoned, its easy communication with all parts of the country, its geographical position which all historical experience has confirmed, and finally upon the accumulated sentiment of seven centuries, and the mounting aspirations of the new nationalism. Delhi is the natural centre of the Indian Dominion, as Calcutta was of the old British Empire.8
By 1937 the British Indian Empire certainly no longer seemed eternal to many people, but an association with Britain as a dominion in the new post-imperial Commonwealth was certainly considered feasible. It was what Goblet, writing at around the same time, considered to be a transformation of British power designed to ensure its permanence in the new era. The emerging Commonwealth was certainly still Anglocentric and was intended to place British world power on a firmer footing in the new and more assertive world.
However, perhaps the reality was that the approaching end of empire, together with the nineteenth-century form of imperialism and all that it entailed, had also underlain the creation of New Delhi from the outset. The fact that the whole project was begun while a Liberal government was in office was the most powerful factor of the time.
The Liberals had never really been imperialist in the sense in which the Conservatives had been since the time of Disraeli. The post-Gladstonian Liberal imperialists of the later nineteenth century were an adaptation to the all-pervasive imperial idea of the time which could not be ignored or easily opposed. From the outset the viceroy Lord Hardinge shared the Liberal sentiments and saw the future as being one of closer Anglo-Indian cooperation rather than the uncompromising old imperial dominance. Thus while the imperial vision was certainly present, the vision of an eventual dominion of India was there too.
Jan Morris considered that the Viceregal Palace was probably the last of the great royal palaces of history. The Raj did not long survive the move to New Delhi. In 1947, after less than twenty years, India at last achieved independence. What had been the British Indian Empire reigned over by the king-emperor in London was divided into four separate dominions of the Crown. The biggest of these was India itself and, as Spear had predicted only ten years earlier, New Delhi became the capital of this new dominion. The viceroy was replaced by a governor-general and the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, was invited by the government of the new dominion to be the first to hold this office. In 1963 India broke the direct link with the British Crown and became the first republic within the Commonwealth. The first prime minister of the new India, Pandit Nehru, had formerly been scornful of the Raj’s new capital, referring to it as ‘a visible symbol of British power, with all its ostentation and wasteful extravagance’.9 Yet despite such condemnation, New Delhi became the capital of the Dominion and subsequently the Republic of India. In this way it was decided that the new state would continue a historic tradition going back even beyond the Sultanate to Prithviraj. By then well into its eighth century, power in India continued to be symbolized by the stones of this city much as it had during earlier times.